David Wallace - Girl With Curious Hair

He either chuckled or wheezed, a deep sound, almost subsonic, from the recesses of his inclined executive chair. I stared at his profile, a caricaturist's dream.

'You and Bird,' he said. 'Damned if you and my Bird don't always ask the same things of Lyndon Johnson, son. It's queer to me.' He brought himself upright to face my bit of the office's darkness. 'I done told Bird just last week how responsibility, why, it is not even like a feeling at all,' he said quietly.

'You can't feel what responsibility feels like? It numbs you?'

He administered the inhaler, played with his fob against the bad light of the window.

'I told Bird it's like the sky, boy. Is what I told her. How about if I come and ask you what does the sky feel like to you? The sky ain't a feeling, boy.'

"We both coughed.

He pointed upward, vaguely up at the horns, nodding as if at something familiar. 'But it's there, friend. The sky is there. It's there, over your ass, every fucking day. 'Matter where you go, boy, look on up, and on top of every goddamned thing else she's there. And the day there ain't no sky. .'

He squeezed and worked the last bits of inhalant out of his nasal inhaler. It was a hideous sound. Before long I had to help Lyndon back over to the office wastebasket full of urine. We stood there, together, on the plain white marble Presidents' floor.

"Mr. Lyndon 'LBJ' Johnson, like all men in public service, was driven both by a great and zealous personal ambition and by a great and zealous compassion for the well-being of his fellow man. He was, like all great men, hell, like all men, a paradox of mystery. He will not and cannot ever be completely or totally understood. But for those of us gathered today under these great lone-star skies to try and understand a man we must try to understand if we are to do him the honor he deserves, I say this. I say to go west. I say the further you go west, the nearer you get to Lyndon Baines Johnson."

— Texas State Senator Jack Childs

Eulogy on the Passing of LBJ

Austin, Texas, 1968

When I received the pink, plainly inscribed invitation to take tea and refreshment with Claudia 'Lady Bird' Johnson, I was prostrate in our big bed, down with a violent flu.

Duverger had been gone almost a week. I had come home from some mass-mailing work in New Hampshire to find him gone. He had left no word and had packed none of his several pieces of luggage. His money and several of my small black office notebooks were gone.

I can offer no better testimony to my feelings for Lyndon's career than my panic that René had either defected to or been shanghaied by some Other Side. Most of the entries in the notebooks were verbatim. One had recounted a Joint Chiefs briefing session held on sinks and hampers and the lip of a claw-footed tub while Lyndon had been moving his bowels on the commode. There was enough truth in those tiny records to embarrass Lyndon beyond repair; he had ordered that everything that was written be written. I admit, with pain, that my first day's thoughts were of Lyndon and betrayal and the masklike Republican we'd all grown to fear.

Three days of frantic searching for Duverger had taken me as far north as the New Hampshire camps of Humphrey, McCarthy, Lindsay and Percy — and that man — and as far south as the dark lounges of Chevy Chase. It left me weak beyond description, and I came down with a violent flu. Lyndon, too, had been sick, out of the office and news for a week. He had not contacted me. No one from either office or White House had called for the three days I had been home ill. And I hadn't the character to call anyone.

'Our husbands and I inquire as to whether you would do us the honor of taking tea and refreshment at our Shore home this evening,' read the note on colored stationery, without letterhead. I had become so trained to look for the letterhead first that the blankness of the First Lady's notes seemed almost high-handed.

And it was well-known scuttlebutt — scuttle, I suspected, from the butt of Margaret's old cartoonist, who had sketched me as a W.C.-Fields-nosed flower girl, holding the '68 train of Johnson as bride — that Mrs. Johnson wanted Lyndon out, and saw his office/ me as the rival she'd never had in life. 'Our husbands,' then, fit what I would hear.

Too, we could never name the heady perfume that had risen from Mrs. Johnson's notes and seduced Duverger from the first. He had shopped, sniffing, for days, and had fixed the central scent as essence of bluebonnet before he had become unable to leave our home altogether.

Duverger was dying of something that was not malaria. All four of my salaries went to Bethesda, where Duverger was not covered and where the staff, like Aquinas before God, could think of nothing to do but define his decline via what it was not. The doctors between whom I had shuttled my seated, coughing husband could isolate nothing but a pattern in his susceptibility to the uncountable diseases that came and thrived in the petri dish that was Washington.

For these last many months I had lain at nighttime holding a man dying of a pattern, encircling with my white arm gray ribs that became more and more defined, feeling pulses through a wrist too wasted narrow to support the length of its long-nailed hand, watching his stomach cave and his hips flare like a woman's and his knees bulge like balls from his legs' receding meat.

'Suis fatigue. M'aimes-tu?'

'Tais-toi. Bois celui-ci.'

'M'aimes-tu?'

An ever weaker me, blinking the cornered translucence of all my connections, I saw Lyndon himself fading before a carnivorous press corps; a war as nasty and real and greenly-broadcast as it was statistical and fuzzily bordered to those of us who read and acted on the actual reports; a reversal of his presidential resolve that the government's raison was before all to reduce sum totals of suffering; a growing intuition of his own frailty as two more well-concealed infarctions left him gaunt and yellow and blotched, his eyes seeming to grow to fit the face that settled into itself around them.

Duverger, who hadn't the strength to leave, was gone. He had taken my notes and left none of his own. Nothing in the vase below the mantel's autographed photo and little Klee. Amid tissues and the popped aluminum shells of antinauseants, I read the finely penned note from Mrs. Johnson, hand-delivered by one of my own distant subordinates in Mail. I breathed at what rose from the note.

'Wardine has prepared some praline mix which I find to complement camomile tea very nicely, Mr. Boyd.'

'Thank you, Ma'am.'

'Thank you that will be all Wardine.'

The black servant in black stockings and a doilied apron wiped away the last of the cold cream that had masked the First Lady's round sharp face. She adjusted the pillow under Mrs. Johnson's feet and withdrew, her back always to me.

I coughed faintly. I wiped my forehead.

'My own husband is near death, child.'

I had arrived late by taxi at the Johnsons' private home, retained from his days as a Senator, a turreted post-plantation thing on the very eastern shore of the Potomac delta that pouted lip-like out into the Atlantic. I could hear ocean and see lightning bubbling over a cloud roof far out to the east's sea. A horn in a channel moaned. I felt at the glands in my throat.

'You don't look well at all yourself, Mr. Boyd.'

I looked about. 'Will the President be able to join us, Ma'am?'

She looked at me over her cup of steam. 'Lyndon is dying, child. He has had great and additional. . trouble with the illness that has been troubling him all these years.'

'He infarcted again?'

'He has asked not to be alone on this night.'

'He's supposed to die tonight, you're saying?'

She readjusted the hem of her robe. 'It's a great trial for all of us who are close to the President.' She looked up. 'Don't you agree?'