Top Down (5 page)

Marti was shaking. So was I. I suddenly wanted to reach across the café table, take her in my arms, and hold her. Comfort her. Pat her head.

This came as a spontaneous wham-wham. It began from nothing more than a natural father-brother-uncle kind of instinct to comfort. Then, in the second part of the wham, the idea of holding her … actually aroused me. The realization brought some embarrassing warmth to my face. Yes, I was a regular red-blooded male with a respectable history of romantic entanglements. But Marti was a kid. She was still in college! I was ten years older—a so-called grown-up. No way was I going to take hold of her. No!

And besides, I was a reporter on a story—even if it was still technically off the record at the moment …

I am proud to say—maybe more relieved than proud if I’m being honest about it—that all I did was suggest she take a break from this traumatic remembering. I offered her a drink again, water, something sweet. But no, she still wanted nothing.

Marti had been talking almost nonstop for a truly amazing two hours. I mostly just listened, longing all the while to have had a tape recorder in addition to my notebook. But I was a good note taker. Plus, I had a pretty good reporting-trained talent of being able to retain in my head the general crux of anything said to me. I also took those several smoking breaks to review and expand my notes and jot down a few key thoughts. She had eaten very little at the Union Station restaurant—only a bite or two of the toast and the eggs, which had long ago gone cold and been taken away by a waitress. The only thing she really consumed was a small bowl of fruit salad and a lot more coffee.

She must be exhausted, I thought, and I suggested that maybe she was too tired to continue? No way. But she was in favor of trying to find a quiet place outside where we could talk. She needed a change in scenery, she said. It was November but Washington weather, unpredictability being its primary trait, had turned up a sunny day with temperatures in the sixties that required only a sweater or a jacket to remain comfortable. We had both.

Off we went through the front door of Union Station and within minutes found the perfect place—a bench in a small park between the station’s circular driveway and the Capitol Building three blocks away. Being outside took some of the pressure off my smoking. Even on the few occasions when I stayed put to light up a cigarette, I made sure none of the smoke ever got in her face.

I decided to steer the conversation toward ways that I might
help her help her father. Yes, I’d witnessed Van Walters’s decision to remove the bubble top and I wouldn’t deny it, but maybe I could persuade her God really did it. Before I could get into any of that, Marti asked about me. Now she was interested in that biographical small talk we’d missed before.

I kept it brief. I always tried to remember the advice from a college reporting class that reporters should not talk to news sources about themselves. Stay on subject—them.

I told Marti that I’d grown up in Kansas, the son of a small daily newspaper editor and his wife who was—I believed then and still do now—the smartest person in town. She ran the library board and the school board and most everything around that mattered. She and my dad had met as students at Kansas State University, but Dad had encouraged me from very early on to go to the University of Missouri, which was known for its excellent journalism school.

“There was a draft, of course, so I knew that no matter what I wanted to do in the long run, I was going to have to go into the service first,” I told Marti, who seemed reasonably interested. “I chose a marine officers’ program and was commissioned the day I graduated from MU.”

“Why the marines?” Marti asked.

“Well, my uncle was a marine in World War Two. Won the Silver Star. And he always said to me, ‘Whatever you do, you should always try to do it with the best’—and the best meant the marines. So it was done.”

“Did you go to Vietnam?” I could tell by the way she asked that having done so might not have been the best thing to do—
in her opinion. The war in Vietnam was still going on as we spoke.

“No, I was lucky,” I reported truthfully. “I was a platoon commander in the Far East but the war hadn’t really started for the U.S. by the time my active-duty commitment ended.”

“Good,” she said.

I couldn’t tell what she meant by that. I wasn’t sure if she was making a statement on the war itself or on the good fortune of my having escaped without having to serve in combat. But I asked her no follow-up questions, choosing to leave any talk of Vietnam for another day.

I wrapped up my mini bio by telling Marti I got my first job at
The Dallas Tribune
in 1962 through a contact of my dad’s. She seemed almost happy when I told her that my real ambition was to eventually spend my life writing fiction—short stories, novels, maybe even a play or two. Maybe live in Paris. My dreams were mostly about winning prizes for novels, not news stories.

“You’re not married, are you?” she asked.

The question, coming from this attractive young woman—kid—caught me off guard. “No, no. Not yet.”

“Been close?”

“Sure.”

“How close?”

“Well, I met somebody in Dallas right after I got out of the marines and went to work at the
Tribune
. She was a seventh-grade English teacher—love at first sight, all of that. I proposed to her in two weeks and she said yes. I thought I had
died and gone to heaven. Then two weeks after that she changed her mind—and that has been that.”

“Why did she change her mind?”

“She was accepted to graduate school—University of Michigan. She asked if I would go with her. I said nope. No good newspapers in Ann Arbor that I knew of …”

“I’ve already been accepted to go on to Penn for a master’s next year,” Marti said.

“So you won’t have to dump your boyfriend—good for you.”

“I don’t have a boyfriend. At least, not one I would want to live my whole life with.”

“What’s the problem with the guy you’re dating?”

“We’re in different worlds.”

I waited for a second explanatory sentence. It took a while, and all she finally said was, “Let’s say he’s more of a doer than a reader and leave it at that.”

“Have there been others who …”

“Hey, enough, please,” she said. “I’ve only lived twenty years so far.”

She had a point. And that pretty much ended our biographical small talk.

We came back around to her father. She wanted me to go with her and speak with her father about my exact memories of Love Field and the bubble top. I was willing to help—honestly, sincerely.

But let’s face it, I also was still thinking this could all eventually lead to a very good—on-the-record—story for me and
my newspaper. It was definitely there in my mind. Hey, that’s what we reporters do. I wouldn’t be a
real
reporter if I didn’t think that way.

And both of us, having taken a major second breath, continued Marti’s post-assassination story with her doing the telling while I listened and wrote.

“
I
KILLED
K
ENNEDY
!”

Marti lay awake the rest of that assassination night hearing those words. Her father’s words, over and over and over. Her eyes wouldn’t close. Neither would her ears. And her mind wouldn’t stop racing. She didn’t move her covers or even get up and go to the bathroom. Not once. She was locked in place in the horror of the day.

Her little bedside alarm clock—it had the famous blue-and-silver star of the Dallas Cowboys on the face—showed it was barely six o’clock when she heard her father leave through the front door of the house and then a car door opening and closing outside.

He was gone. Her father, the man who said he alone had done something wrong and killed Kennedy, was gone. Where was he going now? To do what? What more was there for him to do?

Marti wasn’t crying. She hadn’t cried again since hearing those words from outside her parents’ bedroom door last night. Her tears, along with everything else, had been locked up tight.

She listened for sounds of her mother out in the hallway
but heard nothing until Rosemary finally said to Marti’s closed door, “Honey, there’s no school, remember. I’m going over to the bank just to see if there’s anything that needs to be done. It’s Saturday so I shouldn’t be long.”

Marti didn’t answer.

“There’s cereal, you know—Wheaties and Rice Krispies, and plenty of milk, so help yourself,” Rosemary said.

Less than a minute later Marti heard the front door slamming. Her mother had left without a word about anything more than breakfast cereal! Not another word!

What about Kennedy? What about what happened yesterday? What about my daddy?

Miraculously, Marti heard the front door reopen.

She heard her mother’s footsteps approaching her bedroom. “I know you may have heard a lot of crazy things last night, honey,” Rosemary said. The bedroom door remained closed. Why didn’t her mother open it and come in to talk and hug and comfort her daughter? And why didn’t she try to explain what her father had shouted about blood and Kennedy?

“He’s just in an awful state, as are all of the agents who were there,” Rosemary said from the hallway. “I bet they all think it was their fault and they are hurting so badly—so, so badly. Your daddy is no different from any of them. That’s all it is. They all think it was their fault. It will go away, though, you’ll see, because it wasn’t their fault. Not your daddy’s or anybody else’s except that crazy communist fool Oswald. What was he doing working at a school book depository building anyhow, that’s what I want to know. Why didn’t the FBI
catch him as a communist and lock him away before he did that?” Rosemary sighed. “See you later, honey. Everything’s going to be okay. Daddy’s going to come back okay. You’ll see. We’ll talk tonight, you and me.”

Marti considered getting out of bed, but before she could make a move the front door slammed again. Rosemary was gone.

A
ND THAT NIGHT
they only barely talked.

“What did he mean that he took something off and it was all his fault?” was the only real question Marti asked her mother.

That exchange came when they finally sat down in the kitchen for a bowl of bean soup with saltine crackers.

“It was about something that happened with the presidential car, I think,” Rosemary answered. “It was nothing. You’ll see. We’ll all see. He’s just upset like all of the agents … you know, about losing a president. There’s nothing more awful for them. They obsess on it.”

“I just hate it for Daddy,” Marti said quietly.

“I know, but put it out of your mind, honey,” Rosemary responded. “You’ll see when he gets back that he’ll be the same Van we know and love.”

And that was it for talk about the wrenching night they had just gone through.

Rosemary went on to tell her that the few people at the bank were all still in tears or shock about the assassination.

She listened, murmuring responses to her mother, but what Marti noticed most was the smell of liquor on her mother’s breath no more than five hours after she’d left for the bank. Rosemary had clearly tried to hide the smell with mints but this didn’t do the job, especially when they sat close at the dinner table over their soup. Marti knew that both her mother and father had an occasional drink of beer or, in her dad’s case, scotch when they went out, but there was none around the house. And Marti had no idea that either of them ever had a drink of anything alcoholic during the daytime.

Where had her mother gone and what had she drunk? Had she been alone or with somebody else? But those were questions to be asked another day.

And yet, amid all the questions, the thing that stoked Marti’s anger was that, though five years later they would remain unasked, she had been left alone by her own mother at one of the most volatile and dramatic moments in history—and their lives. She was as upset as she was hurt and didn’t know how to express those feelings. All she really wanted was for her mother to hug her long and hard and talk about
everything
—not just the occasional small exchanges about food, homework, and schedules.

But she was only fifteen and she didn’t know how to ask for what she needed.

I
T WAS SEVEN
thirty at night about three days later. Marti was in the den doing some English grammar homework when, suddenly,
there he stood in the front door hallway. Marti fought off her first impulse—to yell for joy and fling herself at her father.

Instead, she slowly stood up, gave a shy half wave.

Her mother, though, moved to him in a flash, and Marti, brushing aside her hesitation, joined Rosemary in wrapping themselves around their father-husband and holding on tight.

“Good to see you, good to see you,” Van Walters said.

His voice was quiet, almost completely without inflection. And he seemed to be only barely touching his wife and daughter. They were doing all of the holding tight.

As they walked together to the kitchen, Marti noticed a disturbing difference in her dad. Everything, from the skin on his face to his shoulders, his walk, and his general posture, was slumping. Van Walters never slumped. He always stood up straight. His posture was always perfect. Secret Service perfect.

And Marti noticed something else strange. Her dad made no mention of the Cowboys, not even the game against the Browns in Cleveland that Sunday following the assassination. Marti had tuned in to watch it on television and heard the play-by-play announcers talk about how this was a game nobody wanted to play, how the Cleveland fans were yelling awful things to the Cowboy players because they represented Dallas, “the city of hate that killed Kennedy.” Some fools were even screaming that they should change the team name to “The Assassins.”

Dandy Don Meredith had started the game, throwing two interceptions and fumbling once in the 27–17 loss to the
Browns. Little Eddie LeBaron threw only five passes, all of them incomplete.

What made the game even harder to watch were the constant network news interruptions. Marti saw the Kennedy casket, covered in the American flag, being taken by horse-drawn caisson from the White House to the Capitol. Then there were breaking developments about some nightclub owner named Jack Ruby having shot Lee Harvey Oswald that morning in the basement of the Dallas police station.