Reclaiming History Page 8

  For all his faults, Lee loves the children. Last night he played with them out on the lawn in the gathering dusk—Ruth’s children, the neighbors’ kids, and his and Marina’s own toddler, June. He loved that. They were still out on the lawn and it was nearly dark when he asked Marina for the third and last time to come back to him. He even agreed to buy her a washing machine, an unusual gesture for Lee, who was always so close with the little money he had. Marina nearly did give in. If he’d waited until Friday evening, she might have said yes. The truth of the matter is, despite their sorry marriage, he’s all she’s got. Even the warm friendship and support of Ruth, who only speaks sufficiently serviceable Russian to teach it part-time at a private high school and is delighted to have Marina around the house to pick up better Russian from her, doesn’t make up for Lee’s absence. But she isn’t ready to give in yet. For once, she enjoys having the upper hand, however slight.

  Lee didn’t sleep well last night, although he’d turned in at ten o’clock, an hour earlier than usual. She could tell he was very upset when he retired for the evening and wasn’t really asleep when she crept into bed after a late, hot bath. Around three in the morning she rested her foot on his leg, but he shoved her foot away hard. “My, he’s in a mean mood,” she thinks, believing he’s angry at her for not coming back to him right away. She senses he may not have slept at all until about five o’clock in the morning.5

  His mood has changed since last night, as it so often does. He seems upset rather than angry. Marina, at the mercy of his moods, knows the difference well. He is quiet and calm. He doesn’t ask her to come to live with him in Dallas anymore.

  As Lee finishes dressing, he comes over to the bed.

  “Have you bought those shoes you were going to get?” he asks.

  “No, I haven’t had time,” Marina answers.

  “You must get those shoes, Mama,” Lee tells her, then adds, “Don’t get up, I’ll get breakfast myself.”

  It was an odd comment for him to make, since there was little danger that she would. Lee rarely ate breakfast, it was usually just a cup of instant coffee, which he had this morning, and she certainly had never fixed him anything before. Why would he say that? she wondered.6

  Before he leaves the bedroom, Lee kisses the children, as he always does, then walks to the bedroom door. He stops and returns to the side of the bed. He has always kissed his wife good-bye and Marina assumes he will do so now. But this time, she only hears his voice.

  “I’ve left some money on the bureau,” he says in his odd, if fluent, Russian. “Take it and buy everything you and Junie and Rachel need.”

  In the dark he has left $170 in bills, and something else—his wedding ring, quietly placed in a little china teacup that had belonged to Marina’s grandmother. She won’t find it until later that day.

  “Bye-bye,” he says, then turns and goes out the door.

  Marina is surprised at her husband’s sudden and unexpected kindness. She knows his $1.25-an-hour job doesn’t really allow for a lot of new shoes, much less everything she and the children need. He certainly had never said such a thing before. But she is used to his erratic behavior, and it doesn’t keep her from drifting back to sleep.7

  7:21 a.m.

  Linnie Mae Randle fixes a lunch at the kitchen counter for her nineteen-year-old brother, Wesley Frazier, to take to work. She sees a man crossing Westbrook Street. She doesn’t recognize him at first but realizes he is heading to where her brother’s automobile is parked in the carport.

  “Who was that?” Linnie Mae’s mother asks from the breakfast table, having caught a glimpse of him as he looked in the kitchen window.

  “That’s Lee,” Wesley says.

  He looks at the clock. It’s late. Wesley likes to leave the house by 7:20 for the fifteen-mile drive into Dallas, even if that means getting there a few minutes early. He finishes off his coffee and jumps up from the table, where he has been having breakfast with his mom and his sister’s kids, and hurries to get his lunch and a jacket. It is a gray, cold, miserable morning, and he will probably need that jacket.8

  Linnie Mae, at the back door, watches Lee go over to Wesley’s beat-up ’59 Chevy four-door, open the right rear door—the sticky one with the broken window—and lay the package he’s carrying on the backseat. She doesn’t pay much attention to the light brown paper package. It’s a couple of feet long, and wider at the bottom than at the top, where he carries it in the fashion soldiers call “trail arms.”9

  It isn’t so surprising that she didn’t recognize Lee, even though in a way she was responsible for getting him his job. She has only caught a couple glimpses of him when he came by to ride into work with Wesley. Linnie Mae knows that he is the husband of that Russian girl who has been staying with Ruth Paine, a neighbor who lives up the street from her. He came up in a conversation one afternoon at another neighbor’s house. In early October, just about the time Marina’s baby was due, Ruth and Marina were there drinking coffee. They were talking about Marina’s husband being out of work at the worst possible time. Linnie Mae told them about the job Wesley had just found at the Texas School Book Depository, a private company at 411 Elm Street near downtown Dallas that warehoused and shipped school textbooks for various publishers. She thought there might be another vacancy there,10 so Ruth called the Depository and was told to have Lee come on in for an interview.11

  Linnie Mae doesn’t have a lot of time to think about Marina’s husband, although she realizes vaguely that it is out of the ordinary for him to be out in Irving on a Friday morning. She’s heard about the odd arrangement where he lives in Dallas and only visits his wife and kids on the weekend. She was surprised to see him coming back with Wesley the night before when she was on her way to the store. Wesley told her Lee had come in a day early to get some curtain rods or something.12

  Wesley is relieved when the old Chevy finally fires up. It has been raining off and on all night and the battery is really weak. He notices that Lee doesn’t have a lunch bag with him, something he has always had before on trips back into Dallas.13

  “Where’s your lunch?” Wesley asks.

  “I’m going to buy it today,” Lee replies.

  Wesley figures Lee will get something from the catering truck that comes around the warehouse at ten o’clock. A lot of the boys do that.14 As Wesley backs the car out, he glances over his right shoulder and notices a brown paper package on the rear seat.

  “What’s the package, Lee?” he asks.

  “Curtain rods,” Oswald says.

  “Oh, yeah,” Wesley nods, shifting into forward. “You said you were going to go get them last night.”15

  Lee doesn’t have a lot to say. He rarely does. Lee is one of those guys who just doesn’t talk very much. Wesley, on the other hand, feels it’s important to make friends. That’s why he introduced himself to Lee when Lee came on the job in mid-October.

  “We’re glad to have you,” he had told Lee. Wesley, a self-described country boy from Huntsville, Texas, had only been on the job four or five weeks himself, but he felt like a veteran. He already knew that Lee’s wife was living up the street from him, so he told Lee, “Any time you want to go, just let me know.”16

  Lee told him he had an apartment in Dallas and wouldn’t be going home every night like most men do. He said he didn’t drive either. That’s when he asked Wesley if he could ride out with him “on Friday afternoon on weekends and come back on Monday morning,” and Wesley said that would be just fine with him.

  Wesley knows Lee’s wife is from Russia but doesn’t think anything about that. Lee said something about being in Russia, Germany, and France, and Wesley figured he had been in the service or something. Wesley doesn’t know much more than that. Come to think of it, he doesn’t even know Lee’s last name.17

  Back in Dallas, nightclub operator Jack Ruby is still asleep. Jack’s day starts when most people are thinking about going home from work. Today he will get up around ten to get his ad into the offices of the
Dallas Morning News, but that’s early for him. Jack’s Carousel Club, on Commerce Street halfway between the county jail and the police station, stays open until two every morning, even though the curious Texas liquor laws require customers to stop drinking at a quarter past midnight. This is kind of a pain in the behind, but Jack is scrupulous about keeping drinks off the table after hours. He runs a clean joint, which everyone knows. Even that vice-squad dick Gilmore has never cited him, and, as one of Jack’s girls says, Gilmore would cite his own mother.

  Dallas is a “dry” town, meaning that hard liquor cannot be sold in a public bar. So Jack’s profit is in beer and champagne. His beer is the cheapest money can buy, and it is served in a glass with a bottom that works like a lens to magnify the modest quantity inside. His bartender also sells “setups,” nonalcoholic beverages to which the customer may add his own liquor from the bottle he brought to the club in a paper bag, which is legal but not very profitable. The real dough is in champagne. Jack sells his champagne, which costs him $1.60 a bottle, for $17.50, and the waitress usually gets the change from a twenty as a tip. The champagne girls get $2.50 for each bottle they persuade their customers to buy. There are over a dozen of Jack’s girls—waitresses, champagne and cigarette girls, and strippers. The strippers work under the American Guild of Variety Artists (AGVA) contract, but the others live on their tips and the commissions on the champagne.18

  The champagne or cocktail girls are called B-girls, companions to the male customers to induce them to buy drinks, but Jack is proud of them. They aren’t hookers. He’s hell on any girl he suspects of making dates with the customers. His girls have class. He really cares about that. So what if most of his customers think his B-girls are hookers and keep buying Jack’s rotgut champagne for them, while the girls keep pouring the stuff into bar towels and ice buckets to avoid drinking it. They are provided with “spit glasses,” frosted tumblers ostensibly filled with ice water, really just ice, that they use to spit the champagne in their mouth into. Jack doesn’t want the girls to drink any more than they absolutely have to. He doesn’t like drunks any more than hookers. Jack’s girls are a major preoccupation. He is always flying off the handle at them, browbeating, bullying, firing them. Diana Hunter, a veteran, reckons Jack has fired her two hundred times. But he’s good to them too, always there with a bit of cash or even a pint of blood when they’re really in trouble. They scream back at him when he loses his temper and turns cruel and mean, but they also know that a short time later he will have forgotten all about it. The girls love Jack in some odd way. Jack is a mensch.19

  Jack Ruby lives in a low-rent district south of downtown, Oak Cliff. Though he is a neat dresser and his personal hygiene is high—taking two or three showers a day—he lives in an apartment full of litter, dirty clothes, unread newspapers, unwashed glasses—an apartment as implacably disordered, out of control, and marginal as his life.20 Jack has troubles. His rock-and-roll joint out on Oak Lawn in North Dallas, the Vegas Club, which his sister Eva runs for him, is in trouble. With Eva out sick, he has to get the kid, Larry Crafard, to look after things out there, but who knows how long that’s going to last—Crafard is a drifter. He was working as a roustabout with Bob Craven’s carny show, “How Hollywood Makes Movies,” until it folded in Dallas last month. Jack lets Larry sleep in the room down at the Carousel and gives him a buck or two for his meals at the Eat Well Café in return for doing odd jobs around the Carousel. So who knows how long Larry will last? Larry’s a good kid, but no way is he going to get back together with that ballsy wife of his, and Jack knows he won’t be around Dallas long.21

  Not only is Eva sick, but Little Lynn is too—that’s one of his strippers, out the whole damned weekend, probably. Drank too much champagne and passed out over at Nichols Brothers garage, but wouldn’t let Jack drive her to the hospital.22 He’ll probably have to send her a couple of bucks, wire it to her over in Fort Worth. She’s most likely pregnant, and that salesman boyfriend of hers is out of work because his car broke down.23

  Jack has his own problems. Like recently with the stripper Jada? He goes to all sorts of trouble and expense to bring her up from New Orleans because she’s supposed to be such a class act, and he’s paying her way over scale, and then she gets out of line, starts doing front bumps and other kinds of things that could get his club shut down in a place like Dallas, and Jack has to douse the lights when it gets too raunchy. Jack screams at Jada and, she says, threatens her. Her agent calls the cops, and Jada files a “threats warrant” for Jack’s arrest. At the peace-bond hearing, Jada tells the judge that Jack was trying to get out of paying her on the rest of her contract by threatening to cut up her wardrobe if she gives him trouble. Her wardrobe, she says, is worth $40,000. Jack’s own arresting officer tells Jada, “Young lady, how in the world could you have $40,000 worth of G strings because that’s all I’ve ever seen you in?”24 And where’s Jack going to get the dough to pay if old Judge Richberg ends up giving him a stiff fine when he’s way behind on the union welfare payments for his dancers?25—particularly with the feds after him for delinquent income taxes,26 and the competition, the Weinstein brothers, beating him to death with their fake “amateur nights” at Abe’s Colony Club and the Theatre Lounge? They have pros there pretending to be housewives and working for ten or fifteen bucks a show,27 way under scale, and you can’t get the AGVA to do anything about it, probably because someone’s paying them off or something. Jack spends his whole time trying to get the AGVA off the dime and start protecting its artists the way it should, but that bunch is so crooked they’d cheat God. In the meantime, Jack has just paid the rent on the Carousel, five hundred bucks, by certified check,28 so he can breathe easy for another little while anyway. People go and tell you show biz is the life, but listen to Jack. Jack knows—it’s tough, really tough.

  Jack’s favorite dachshund, Sheba, snuffs and begins to snore, but Jack sleeps on. Jack really loves Sheba. He tells some people she’s his wife. Sheba is always with Jack, goes everywhere with him, even sleeps in his bed. The four dachshunds he’s now keeping in a room off the kitchen at his club (he’s had as many as ten dogs at a time) he calls his children. He gets really pissed off if you take that as a joke, tilting his head in a menacing way.29

  7:30 a.m.

  In Fort Worth’s dowdy, brown-brick Texas Hotel, George Thomas enters the small foyer of suite 850 and raps lightly on the door of the master bedroom. He hears a stirring beyond the door and then the word “okay,” a communication from the president that the First Lady had not slept in her husband’s bedroom that night. If she had, like at the White House, the president’s response would have been a cough if he didn’t want to disturb her in her slumber.

  “Mr. President,” the portly black valet calls gently, then pushes the door open and steps across the threshold.

  “It’s raining,” Thomas says.

  A voice, with a distinctive Boston accent, groans from under the covers, “That’s too bad.”30

  President John F. Kennedy throws back the comforter and swings his legs over the side of the bed, planting his feet on the icy floor. His first appearance of the day is out of doors, and later, several motorcades are planned—useless for vote-getting if the president and his wife have to be driven past sodden, disgruntled crowds, hidden beneath the limousine’s plastic bubble top. While the president showers, Thomas lays out his clothes—a blue-gray, two-button suit, a dark blue tie, and a white shirt with narrow gray stripes.31

  If, for a few moments in this blandly impersonal hotel room, he seems like just another American head of a household getting up to go to work, that’s an illusion, for Jack Kennedy is the chief executive of the most powerful government on earth, the commander of its most powerful military machine, the most powerful man alive. Even the impression that this nondescript eighth-floor suite* in Fort Worth is far from the White House is an illusion. The White House is there, in the hotel with him, in the suite, never beyond the sound of Jack Kennedy’s voice. To make sure
that none of the far-flung people and agencies of the American government are out of range of that voice, an elite group of Signal Corps technicians from the White House Communications Agency travels ahead of the president to install a jungle of special telephone circuits, relays, and networks that are tied back to the key switchboard in the east basement of the executive mansion, and Jack Kennedy is never allowed to be more than five minutes away from that network.

  Many of his enormous entourage are already awake and waiting for him to emerge from the shower. Some who watched through the night, like the nine Secret Service agents of the White House detail† on the twelve-to-eight shift, will sleep only after passing their responsibilities on to the next shift. John F. Kennedy’s presidency is in fact a collection of special teams that never sleep, teams with code names: an S team for communications, a D team for the Secret Service, a W team for the president’s staff, a V team for the vice president’s staff. The L team is the president and his family—Jack is Lancer, Jackie is Lace, their children Lyric and Lark, and they all live in the Crown (or Castle), a code name for the White House. There are political advisers, medical men, the military, secretarial pools, and a luggage crew, and every individual has a precisely worked-out itinerary and schedule specifying his transportation, accommodations, and duties for every moment of the three-day trip through Texas.32

  A peculiarly inconspicuous but nonetheless vivid symbol of the president’s power is Warrant Officer Ira D. Gearhart, the man with the “satchel,” or the “football.” The football is a locked metal suitcase jammed with thirty pounds of codes and equipment that Kennedy can use to launch America’s nuclear strike force. In the event of a missile attack on America or Europe the president will have only fifteen minutes to make up his mind on how to respond. Kennedy’s military aides will actually operate the equipment, but it is Gearhart’s lugubrious duty to be there with the football—and to remember the combination of the lock—if Kennedy decides to push the button. Gearhart, known to the president’s staff as “The Bagman,” is never far from the president.33