David Wallace - Girl With Curious Hair

'So I'm told, sir.'

He rotated his chair toward me, noiseless, still fondling the policy card he'd written, tracing his lip's outline with it as he scanned forms.

'Says here you went and dropped out of Yale Business School, does it.'

'I did that, sir, yes. I left Yale.'

'Yale is in Connecticut, also,' he said thoughtfully.

I fluttered my coat pockets. 'It is.' I paused. 'In all honesty sir I was asked to leave,' I said.

'Met Jack Childs's little girl at Yale, then? Kicked in the butt by love? Dropped them books and picked up a loved one? Admirable. Similar.' He had his boots, two big boots with sharp shining toes, up on his desk. The eyes behind that big face were looking at something far away.

'Had to get married did you? Had to leave?'

'Sir, in all honesty, I was asked to leave.'

'Yale up there in Connecticut asked you to leave?'

'Yes sir.'

He had rolled the card into a tight cylinder and had it deep inside his ear, probing at something, looking past me.

"Tomorrow will be drastically different from today."

— Speech to National Press Club, Washington, D.C.,

April 17,1959

"The President is a restless man."

— Staff member, 1965

"The President is a wary man."

— Staff member, 1964

"I doubt if Lyndon Johnson ever did anything impulsive in his life, he was such a cautious, canny man."

— The Honorable Sam Rayburn, 1968

'I committed indiscretions,' I told Lyndon. 'Indiscretions were committed, and I was asked to leave.'

Lyndon was looking pointedly from Piesker to his wristwatch. Piesker, the aide, whimpered a little as he collated sheets at that very long knotty-pine table beneath a painting of scrub and dead-brown hills and a dry riverbed under a blue sky.

'I was asked by Yale to leave,' I said. 'That's why my postgraduate transcript appears as it does.'

He was always right there, but you had the sense that his side of a conversation meandered along its own course, now toward yours, now away.

'Me personally,' he said, 'I worked my ass all through college. I shined some shoes in a barber's. I sold pore-tightening cream door-to-door. I was a printer's devil at a newspaper. I even herded goats, for a fellow, one summer.' I saw him make that face for the first time. 'Jesus I hate the smell of a goat,' he said. 'Fucking Christ. Ever once smelled a goat, boy?'

I tried my best to shake my head regretfully. I so wish I could summon the face he made. I was laughing despite myself. The face had seemed to settle into itself like a kicked tent, his eyes rolling back. My laughter felt jagged and hysterical: I had no clue how it would be taken. But Lyndon grinned. I had not yet even been asked to sit. I stood on this great red echoing floor, separated from Lyndon and his boots by yards of spur-scuffed mahogany desktop.

'Probably heard rumors about what it smells like, though,' he mused.

'Some grapevine or other, having to do with animal smells, I'm sure I. .'

But he sat up suddenly straight, as if he'd remembered something key and undone. The suddenness of it made Piesker drop his shears. They clattered. Lyndon looked me up and down closely.

'Shit, son, you look about twenty.'

"Remember that one of the keys to Lyndon Johnson is that he is a perfectionist — a perfectionist in the most imperfect art in the world: politics. Just remember that."

— An old associate, 1960

I finally got to sit. My back had been starting to get that sort of museum stiffness. I sat in a corner of Lyndon's broad office for four hours that cool spring day. I watched him devour Piesker's collected, clipped, and collated packet of important articles from the nation's most influential newspapers. I watched aides and advisors, together and separate, come and go. Lyndon seemed to forget I was here, in an outsized chair, in the corner, my coat puddled around my lap as I sat, watching. I watched him read, dictate, sign and initial all at once. I watched him ignore a ringing phone. I noticed how rarely such a busy man's phone seemed to ring. I watched him speak to Roy Cohn for twenty solid minutes without once answering Cohn's question about whether Everett Dirksen could be shown to be soft on those who were soft on Communism. Lyndon looked over at my corner only once, when I lit a smoke, baring his teeth until I put the long cigarette out in a low ceramic receptacle I prayed was an ashtray. I watched the Senator receive an elegantly accented Italian dignitary who wanted to talk about sales of Texas cotton to the Common Market, the two men sitting opposite on slim chairs in the waxed red floor's center, drinking dark coffee out of delicate saucer-and-spoon complexes brought in by Lyndon's personal secretary, Dora Teane, a heavily rouged, eye-browless woman with a kind face and a girdle-roll. I watched Lyndon leave the slender spoon in his cup and reach casually down into his groin to ease his pants as he and the dignitary talked textiles, democracy, and the status of the lira.

The light in the office reddened.

I think I was drowsing. I heard a sudden: 'Yo there in my corner!

'Don't just sit there with your mind in neutral, boy,' Lyndon was saying, rolling down his shirtsleeves. We were alone. 'Go and talk to Mrs. Teane out front. Go get orientated. I once see a disorientated boy on Lyndon Baines Johnson's staff, that boy's ass gets introduced to a certain sidewalk.'

'I'm hired, then? The interview's over?' I asked, standing, stiff.

Lyndon seemed not to hear. 'The man that invented specially convened sessions of the United States Senate, that's the man ought to be made to herd goats,' drawing his jacket on carefully, easing into it with a real grace. He fastened his cuff studs as he crossed the floor, his walk vaguely balletic, his boots clicking and jingling. I followed.

He stopped before his door and looked at his topcoat, on its coat hook. He looked to me.

The coat hook was the same ornately carved wood as the office door. I held Lyndon's coat up as he slipped back into it, snapping the lapels straight with a pop.

'May I ask what exactly I'm to be hired to do?' I asked, stepping back to give him room to rotate in front of the mirror, checking his coat.

Lyndon looked at his watch. 'You're a mailboy.'

I didn't parse. 'Isn't that a little redundant?'

'You deliver mail, boy,' he said, bearing down on the door's handle. 'You think you can deliver some mail in this office do you?' I trailed him through the noise and fluorescence of the staff's office complex. There were cubicles and desks and Congressional Records and gray machines. The harsh doubled overhead lights threw the range of his shadow over every desk he passed.

'The Senator places great importance on communication with citizens and constituents at all times,' Dora Teane told me. I was handed an index card. Its heading, bold-face, read SAME DAY DIRECTIVE. "It is an office regulation for the staff that every piece of mail the Senator receives must be answered that same day it came in.' She put her hand on my arm. I got a faint odor of luncheon meat. The card was filled with numbered instructions, the handwriting spiky and almost childish. I was sure it was not the penmanship of a secretary.

'That'—Mrs. Teane indicated the index card—'is an unprecedented regulation for offices of Senators.'

She showed me the Dirksen Building's basement mailroom, the mail boxes, mail bags, mail carts. Lyndon Johnson received seas of mail every day.

"I'm a compromiser and a maneuverer. I try to get something. That's the way our system in the United States works."

— In The New York Times, December 8,1963

Margaret and I found a pleasant walk-up apartment on T Street NW. I was able to walk to the Dirksen Building. Margaret, who had gumption and drive, landed a part-time job teaching composition to remedials at Georgetown. I quickly became familiar with a good many of the huge number of young staffers who swarmed yearly from eastern colleges to the Hill. I established a regular relationship with a shy, smooth young press aide to another senior Southern Senator in the Building. Peter, who lasted four months, had a marvelous Carolinian manner and was as interested in discretion as I.