David Wallace - Girl With Curious Hair

We listened- ate from paper plates. Lyndon stomped his boot in time to the band.

I felt a hand's tininess on my wrist. 'Perhaps you would do me the honor of calling to take tea and refreshment at some time.' Mrs. Johnson smiled, holding my gaze only as long as was needed to communicate something. I shivered slightly, nodding. Mrs. Johnson excused herself and moved off, turning heads and parting crowds, radiating some kind of authority that had nothing to do with power or connection or the ability to harm.

I hitched up my shorts, which tended even then to sag.

'Quit mooning around and go get you some barbecue!' Lyndon shouted in my ear, tearing at an ear of corn, stomping.

Lyndon had his second serious and first secret coronary in 1962. I was driving him home from the office, late. We moved east through Washington and toward his private ocean-side home. He began gasping in the passenger seat. He couldn't breathe properly.

The nasal inhaler had no effect. His lips blued. Mr. Kutner of the Secret Service and I had a hard time of it even getting him into the house.

Lady Bird Johnson and I stripped Lyndon down and massaged his bypass-scarred chest with isopropyl alcohol. Lyndon had wheezed that this usually helped his breathing. We massaged him. He had the sort of tired, bulblike breasts old men have.

His lips continued to cyanidize. He was having his second serious coronary, he gasped. Lady Bird massaged him all over. He refused to let me ask Kutner to call an ambulance. He wanted no one to know. He said he was the Vice President. It took Lady Bird's veto finally to get him to Bethesda Naval in a black-windowed Service sedan. Kutner ignored traffic lights. It took both Lady Bird's hands to hold Lyndon's hand as he fought for breath and clutched his shoulder. He was plainly in great pain.

'Shit,' he kept saying, baring his teeth at me. 'Shit, boy. No.'

'Yes, no,' Mrs. Johnson said soothingly into his giant blue ear.

The Vice President of the United States was in Bethesda for eighteen days. For routine tests, we had Salinger tell the press. Somehow, toward the end of his stay, Lyndon persuaded a surgeon to remove his healthy appendix. Pierre talked to the media at length about the appendectomy. Lyndon showed people the appendectomy scar at every public opportunity.

'Damn appendix,' he would say.

He began to take prescribed digitalis. Lady Bird forced him to stop eating the fried pork rind he kept in his top right desk drawer alongside his silver-handled revolver. I tried hard to stop smoking in Lyndon's office.

I received a note on plain pink stationery. 'My husband and I wish to thank you for your kind and discreet attention to our needs during my husband's recent illness.' The note smelled wonderful; M. Duverger said he wanted to smell the way L'Oiseau's note smelled.

"I graduated from the Johnson City High School back in Texas in a class of six. For some time I had felt that my father was not really as smart as I thought he ought to be, and I thought that I could improve on a good many of my mother's approaches to life, as well. So when I got my high school diploma I decided to follow the old philosopher Horace Greeley's advice and 'Go West, Young Man,' and seek my fortune. With twenty-six dollars in my pocket and a T-Model Ford automobile, five of my schoolmates and I started out early one morning on our way to the Golden West, the great state of California. We got there in due time, minus most of my twenty-six dollars, and I got a very well-paying job of ninety dollars a month running an elevator up and down. But I found at the end of the month, after I paid for three meals and paid for my room and my laundry that I was probably better off back there eating Mama's food than I was in California. So I went back to Texas and I got a job with the Highway Department. We didn't have to get to work until sunup, and we got to quit every night at sundown. We did have to get to work on our own time. We had to be at work at sunup, and that was usually twenty or thirty miles down the Highway, and we had to ride home on our own time after sundown. I got paid the magnificent salary of a dollar a day. After a little over a year of that at the Highway Department, I began to think that my father's advice that I should go and take some more training and not be a school drop-out— maybe he was wiser than I had thought a year before. In other words, he became a lot smarter while I was gone in California and on the Highway. And with the help of the good Lord, and with a mother persistently urging to me to go back to school and get some training, I hitchhiked fifty miles to get back into the classroom, where I spent four long years. But I have been reasonably well-employed ever since. I now have a contract that runs until January 20,1965.

— Speech to Graduating Class

Amherst College,

Amherst, Massachusetts

May 25,1963

Mother came to Washington just once in those ten years to visit; she and Margaret kept in very good touch.

The day my mother visited, Duverger cooked all morning, a crown roast, yams in cream, and Les Jeux Dieux, a Haitian dessert, a specialty, airy and painfully sweet. He fussed nervously around the kitchen all morning in only an apron and heels while I vacuumed under furniture and worked surfaces over with oil soap.

Over drinks in the spotless room redolent of spiced pork, mother talked about Margaret Childs and how mother and Jack and Sue-Bea Childs so hoped that Margaret's hospitalization for alcohol dependency would mean a new lease on life for a dear girl who'd never once done anything to hurt anybody. Duverger kept fidgeting in the sportcoat I'd lent him.

It was the only completely silent dinner party I've ever experienced. We listened to the sounds of our knives against our plates. I could hear differences in our styles of mastication.

Our housewarming gift from her was a false cluster of grapes, the grapes purple marbles on a green glass stem.

My mother did not look old.

'Elle a tort,' Duverger kept repeating, later, as he applied the gel. He had little English he was proud of; we spoke a kind of pidgin when alone.

'Elle a tort, cette salope-là. She has wrong. She has wrong.'

I asked what he meant as he spread cold gel on himself and then me. He opened me roughly, rudely. I winced into the pattern of the bed's headboard.

'About what is Mother wrong?'

'She hates me because she believes you love me.'

He sodomized me violently, without one thought to my comfort or pleasure, finally shuddering and falling to weep against me. I had cried out several times in pain.

'Ce n'est pas moi qui tu aimes.'

'Of course I love you. We share a life, Rene.'

He was having difficulty breathing. 'Ce n'est not I.'

'Whom, then?' I asked, rolling him off. 'If you say I do not love you, whom do I love?'

'Tu m'en a besoin,' he cried, rending dark bedroom air with his nails. 'You need me. You feel the responsibility for me. But your love it is not for me.'

'My love is for you, Duverger. Need, responsibility: these are part of love, in this nation.'

'Elle a tort.' He turned himself away, curling fetal on his side of the bed. 'She believes we are not lonely.' I said nothing.

'Why must it be lonely?' he said. He said it as if it were a statement. He kept repeating it. I woke once, very late, to his broad brown back, moving, a rhythm, his open hand to his face, still repeating.

"He sees life as a jungle. No matter how long a rein you think you're on, he's always got the rein in his hands."

— Former associate, 1963

"Most of his worries are of his own making. He sees troubles where none exist. He's liable to wake up in the morning and think everything's got loose during the night,"