Celebrity, p.1
Celebrity, page 1
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Celebrity
A Novel
Thomas Thompson
This is a work of fiction. If the reader encounters real names and what seem to be real events, they should be considered only guideposts on an imagined journey.
This book is for Betty Prashker and Robert Lantz.
And for my friend, K.R.
PROLOGUE
A SILENT PRINCE
Two lean men, weathered and intractable as bois d’arc fence posts, pretended to idle against the wall of the hospital corridor. They might have been taken for dutiful sons, resting, perhaps, from the ordeal of watching a stubborn father slip away. After ten days in place, they had become part of the landscape. They smoked readymades and rarely spoke and mainly squinted down at their boots, the prideful anchors of Texans, boots that gleamed like copperheads drowsing in the Big Bend sun.
When nurses or orderlies passed, or country women glued to the arms of farmers with turkey gobbler necks, the two men nodded politely and tipped their hats. Only when an enemy sashayed down the hall on some cleverly disguised errand did they tense—and betray their reason for propping up the wall. Thus far, their more exotic unmaskings included a counterfeit janitor whose mop bucket contained a camera, and a phony candy-striper whose towering wig concealed in its curls a tape recorder. Heave ho.
When such fraudulent journalism was suspected, the two men, who were plainclothes detectives for the Fort Worth Police Department, blocked the door of room 610 and became stone-carved lions. As is said in Texas, dawn could easier sneak past a rooster. Their orders were that no purveyor of news was to enter this room, and nobody had—even the sweet-talkers with blank checks and seductive arguments about the public’s right to know. On the second day of the vigil, a photographer from Paris-Match offered $10,000 for two minutes inside. Tempting.
Their demeanor softened only at the end of each day, when the District Attorney of Tarrant County, accompanied by the doctor in charge of the hospital’s most celebrated patient, made a regular visit. The prosecutor, whose name was Calvin Sledge and who intended to be governor of Texas by the time he turned forty-five, which was only four years off, was on this particular afternoon, as during the past fortnight, staggered by the easy riches of tribute. Within the sick man’s suite, the hospital bed had become a steel sloop afloat on a sea of roses. Spikes of lemony gladioli, thick bouquets of asters and daisies, mums like emissaries from the sun brought warmth and cheer. Baskets of rainbow phlox and orchids in hand-painted china pots, even a dwarf banana tree whose branches had fingers of ripening fruit, these crowded every windowsill and dresser top. Telegrams and get-well cards tumbled to the floor with the slam of the door. If a king was dying or a princess betrothed, there could not have been more floral attention. But if the man for whom they were intended saw, or smelled, or felt the heady perfumes, he gave no sign.
Oh, he was alive; the machines to which he was bound so testified. But he was, otherwise, a void.
“Would you look at this,” whispered Calvin Sledge, reading from one of the telegrams with an adolescent catch in his voice. “It’s from the White House and it says, ‘My wife and I and the nation pray for your speedy recovery.’”
The attending physician, Witt by name, shrugged. He was long ago sated by the tumult. “The Fords sent flowers, too. Sinatra sent a case of French wine. There’s a telegram from Cary Grant. Elizabeth Taylor. John Connally. So far nothing from the Vatican, but Princess Grace’s secretary called. Every room on the floor’s filled up with posies. Some poor bastard three doors down got hay fever so bad from the pollen last night his heart went into arrhythmia.”
Dr. Witt, a gangling farm boy of a man with jug ears, short cuffs, scuffed shoes, and a face that wore deep-plowed corn rows, was profoundly weary. He had not left the hospital since the patient was brought in. Gently now he took the withered, ivory-hued wrist, counted the pulse, scribbled numbers on a thick metal chart that was tied to the end of the bed and hidden by a fountain of erupting golden roses. Next he peeled back the corner of a thick bandage that swaddled the patient’s throat. It was caked with blood but the physician nodded, apparently satisfied.
“Has he been conscious yet?” inquired Sledge.
“By strictest definition, no,” answered Dr. Witt. He wrote something new on the chart. Sledge made a mental reminder to subpoena the records. Best he start the process immediately, realizing how cranky hospitals are with their documents.
“Has he said anything?”
“Nope.”
“Nothing at all?”
The doctor shook his head mechanically. He added a new lyric to the dirge sung each afternoon. “And as a matter of fact, I don’t much think he will.”
“Ever?”
“That’s my opinion.”
“But sometimes you guys are wrong, right? I mean, cancers dissolve for no reason, don’t they?”
“Yep,” agreed Witt. “And the blind suddenly see. The deaf hear. The lame walk. The crazies write poetry. There’s a Nobel Prize waiting for the fool who can define ‘miracle.’ What we’re dealing with here is a fellow who’s checked out—for reasons we’ll probably never know.”
“Okay to make a run at him?”
The doctor smiled and nodded, but his assent said: Why waste the time and energy? “You might as well teach those roses to sing ‘The Eyes of Texas,’” he said, busy with the clamp on an IV tube.
Sledge leaned over the bed and tried to sound as routinely casual as a man visiting his tennis partner. “So, ole buddy, it’s Cal. How you feelin’ today?”
Nothing.
“Well, you’re sure lookin’ better. Gettin’ a little color in those cheeks.… Seems like everybody’s rootin’ for you to get well. Did you hear me read that telegram from the President? I’d be mighty proud of that, if I was you.… By the way, I just saw some of your people down at the soda pop machine. They’ve got a prayer circle going for you.…” But reference to President and prayer brought the DA no response. He waited. Outside, an unemotional loudspeaker voice summoned cardiac resuscitation to a nearby room. Life and death dueling everywhere.
Dr. Witt gestured for Sledge to hurry. The DA’s eyes telegraphed back silent frustration. What was the key to this jammed lock? There had to be one. Witt saw the impatience and motioned Sledge into a corner. “Listen,” he hissed testily, “I’ve had patients who I thought were faking a coma. I grabbed their nuts and squeezed until they turned honest. But this guy is out. Can’t you accept that?”
“No,” said Sledge, shaking free and hurrying in rising anger to the bed. “Talk to me, boy,” he commanded, the dictate causing no more stir than the clear fluids gliding silently into the patient’s vein. Behind the sickbed, monitors of vital signs clicked and whirred, sensuous computerized lines leaping and falling, this series high, the next a tumble—peaks, valleys, metaphors for the course of men’s lives. Now his time was gone and Sledge had failed—again. He wanted the subject to share his anxiety. “Goddamnit, fella, I’m gonna be real candid. For ten days I’ve walked into this room and tried to pound some sense into your celebrated skull. And you know what? I think you may be playin’ a little possum. I think you hear just about every damn word I waste on you. I think you can open your eyes and look me man-to-man—and if you did that, you’d see I’m on your side. Gawd almighty, boy, I can’t convict that sorry bastard lessen you gimme a break.”
The doctor’s patience snapped. He grabbed the DA’s shoulder. But Sledge was not prepared to yield. He bent over the patient’s face, smelled the sour exhaust of medicine. And he cried, “The numbers don’t add up! Your EKG’s okay. Your EEG’s okay. Every damn ee-fuckin’-gee on the chart’s okay. If you’re really a carrot, then your next stop’s a jar at UT Medical School. They’ll be studyin’ you for decades. Christ, fella, why don’t you tell me what happened that night?”
“That’s enough;” ordered Dr. Witt.
“Please, Doc. Thirty seconds.” Sledge was tired of tact. What he wanted to do was rage, threaten, spill all his confusion, disbelief, and endangered ambition onto the bed of roses. But he was being pushed toward the exit like a gurney with frozen wheels.
Something unexpected stopped them both.
Breath drawn, the prosecutor spun around and stared at the bed. From somewhere in the flowers had come a noise—faint, rattling, like a short hiss of steam from an old radiator. But it was human, not a machine.
“Did you hear that?” asked the DA with guarded excitement.
The physician shook his head. He would not admit to hearing anything.
“Dammit, well I did. I heard something,” insisted Sledge. “It sounded like rich … rich something … I’ll kiss your ass on Throckmorton Street if he didn’t say …”
“He said nothing. Maybe he sighed. They do that. They sigh. They expel breath. Their guts rumble. He’s got nothing much left to say anything with.…”
Outside, Sledge praised the two policemen for their vigilance. His darkest fantasies conjured emulators of Jack Ruby and Sirhan Sirhan, that new category of American celebrity—the assassinator. He told the guards he would return again tomorrow. “Not if you pull that crap again,” interjected Dr. Witt. “One more scene like that—and I’ll throw your butt out of the hospital. I’m the law here.” Prosecutor and physician parted uneasily.
Engulfed by the roses, imprisoned by technology, the patient waited. Time passed; how much he neither knew nor cared. Later he opened his eyes a hairline crack, shut them quickly, content to be alone in the darkness. “Which night?” he mouthed again, silently, wandering through a door he had never quite managed to close, not in a quarter of a century.
Rain. He heard rain. How exquisitely appropriate. Soft spring rain was pelting the windows of what he reckoned was a long ago reserved chamber in hell.
BOOK ONE
THE THREE PRINCES
Chapter One
For seven straight days, rain tortured the heart of Texas. And when sun broke through the muck, clear and ripe on the third Friday of May 1950, it seemed both benediction and invocation. But it was only a tease, false hope. By midmorning the sun surrendered to fresh regiments of thunderheads and by noon the plains of north-central Texas were winter gray, sopping, and chilled. Beside the highways that fed Fort Worth, wildflowers fell, bluebonnets and Indian paintbrushes drooping like cheerleaders whose team had lost. The Trinity River surged out of its banks; the Brazos lowlands were becoming swamps of brown, sucking foam. The erupting hues of Texas spring washed away like makeup on a widow’s face.
The rain was cussed by farmers, blessed by flu doctors and auto body shop owners, discussed by everybody, for there is nothing Texans relish talking about more. That the deluge was about to alter drastically the courses of several young and promising lives, no one knew this unpleasant Friday noon.
Kleber Cantrell took his anger out on his beast of burden, an elderly ’38 De Soto, prewar hand-me-down from Father, a contraption uncanny in ability to reflect the owner’s mood and world. Today the alternator was expiring, the last tire with tread was turning bald, assorted innards wheezing as it reached dry haven beneath the portico. There, nestled beside Kleber’s home, the senile old tank gasped and died. The radio played on like fingernails growing on a cadaver and Kleber lingered a few moments, anxious to catch the noon news on WBAP. It soon became apparent that not much good was going on anywhere.
Harry Truman was whistle-stopping across the belly of America, leaping on and off cabooses, dedicating fruits from the pork barrel, draping Umatilla Indian blankets around his shoulders, scattering “hells” and “damns” like a farmer strewing rye, trying to convince a sorely unhappy electorate that under the sacred banner of the Democratic Party, the standard of living for 150 million Americans was sure to double—guaranteed double—within ten years. And as metaphoric companion to the storm clouds darkening the skies of Texas, a U.S. senator named Joe McCarthy was pissing on Harry’s glory train, repeating a soon-to-be notorious accusation: “I have here in my hand a list of two hundred five names who are known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy in our State Department.” Joe was starting to worry folks, seeing as how Russia had just announced the detonation of the first red atomic bomb.
All of this Kleber heard and noted, but, uncharacteristically, with but half an ear. The news for which he risked a dead battery came last: “Well, fellow swimmers,” drawled the announcer in a voice that commenced like butter and soured quickly to clabber, “like the feller says, if you don’t like the weather in Texas, just wait a durn minute. Today we got somethin’ for everybody. We got a norther due in, yes I said norther, and yes this is the end of May; we got more rain—maybe another inch and a half; we got hail, we got reports of tornadoes up around Wichita Falls and west of Weatherford. The only good thing I can pass on is that it’s not supposed to freeze. No need to put the baby tomato plants under the tarp. But by ten o’clock tonight it should be colder’n a gravedigger’s handshake.”
So what else is new, fretted Kleber as he stormed into the house where he had lived every single day of eighteen years.
“Well, shit,” he swore, but not very loud. Even though no one else was in the house, his mother would somehow know if profanity was used. It was all too unfair. His epochal season—the final days of high school—was just about devastated by climatic caprice. Kleber aimed and threw imaginary darts against the kitchen wall. Class garden party? Rained out. Wham! Senior prom? At twenty prepaid bucks a couple? Disaster. Girls wading in with collapsed coiffures, gowns soaked to the calf, camellia corsages (three bucks a bloom and you had to buy two) dropping petals like molting turkeys. Wham! Wham! The way things were happening—or not happening—he would get about halfway through his valedictory address tomorrow night just as the roof of Will Rogers Auditorium collapsed. The best advice he could impart to the Class of ’50 was how to build an ark.
Kleber peeled off his dripping red sweater and khaki trousers and threw them onto the mirror-waxed beige linoleum floor, an impulsive act that jarred the temper and tone of his mother’s house. For a few edgy moments, he enjoyed the audacious feeling that came from standing in VeeJee Cantrell’s kitchen clad only in his underwear. But he hurriedly found his bathrobe and regained the conformity of middle-class life in neutral gear.
He stared glumly out the window. The neighborhood hardly changed character under the assault of rain. Storm gray was as becoming as sunlight beige. This block of Cloverdale Avenue contained buff brick foursquare houses that were the aesthetic equals of orthopedic shoe boxes. Each had been constructed around 1928, the edge of the Depression. And each had waited obediently, like steadfast lovers, for the men to return from World War II. Here was the enclave of first-generation urban; most every parent on the block had been born on a farm somewhere and had come to the city in search of red silk and gold coins. Instead they found paycheck labor as insurance salesmen, vice-principals, gas station owners, civil servants, and plumbers. They married secretaries and shopgirls. They bred children, worshipped the Protestant God, paid taxes, and dared not ask for more. The residents of Cloverdale Avenue had reached their designated ceilings—one stories all—and settled for that. Kleber Cantrell could not wait to escape.
On the kitchen table, a basket of pale yellow apples contained a note for Kleber. His mother’s orderly script gave a moment-by-moment itinerary:
Noon: Monnig’s to buy graduation presents.
1 p.m. Harris Hospital—Visit Aunt Lula (Worse, spreading they say)
2 p.m. Church—Alto Section Practice
3 p.m. Ike-for-President Petition Meeting (I’ve got 114 signatures!)
4 p.m. Safeway (Hope 4 dzn. hot dogs enuf)
5 p.m. Latest—Home (Potato salad in icebox. Don’t forget to hang up cap and gown on closet door to smooth wrinkles. Mack called twice. T.J. once.
Love, Your Mother)
One thing about Ma, thought Kleber, she never lets a body speculate about her march through the hours. Life With Mother was as itemized as a restaurant check. He wondered once if eighteen years and nine months prior, VeeJee jotted down: “9:20 p.m. Conceive Child, 9:30 p.m. Knit Booties.” Presumably, thirty years hence, she would squeeze into her schedule: “3:35 p.m. Perish.”
At least every other day, VeeJee sermonized on the gift of time, delivering a living legacy to her only child that robbed him of leisure, “Time is precious,” the mother liked to cry. “Just before I say my prayers at night, I make a mental list of everything I accomplished that day. If there is one idle gap, I am ashamed. And if I have not learned something new, then I have wasted my brain and God’s most blessed resource—time.” Kleber would go through life unable to take a nap or a vacation without feeling guilty.
VeeJee’s crowded agendas were eclectic. Already in less than half of 1950, she had mastered rose pruning, first aid with special honors in snakebite and cardiac resuscitation, and was well into the memorization of Proverbs. All of them. Moreover, she was eagerly learning about Communism, having discovered through the West Side Women’s Current Affairs Circle that Joseph Stalin was not the rakish grandpa who linked hands with FDR and Churchill and promised not to munch any neighbor’s boundaries. VeeJee was now persuaded that the Soviets were preparing to invade Texas. Two weeks earlier, she wrote a Hollywood studio in protestation of a planned film about Hiawatha. Conservative thought held that the Indian peacemaker was a Marxist hero. She even took down the framed print of two fluttering doves above gnarled hands in prayer. For years the picture had hung in the guest bedroom. “Doves are Red now, sad to say,” she announced, with fervor that would rewrite Noah’s Flood if permitted.
