He opened one of the glass doors that led from his office to the garden. It was dusk, the hour, in Washington, when the starlings began their raspy chirp from the ledges of government buildings, when the deepening twilight unearthed the ghosts of the city’s past. By day the buildings and monuments belonged to the civil servants and the busloads of tourists, but in the moments that formed the edge between daylight and dark, the past slid from its moorings for a brief instant. If he listened carefully, he could hear the footsteps of Cordell Hull clacking down the Gothic corridors of the Old Lady of Pennsylvania Avenue, the ugly building next door that had once housed all of State, War and Navy. He could hear the steady pacing of Abraham Lincoln on the polished floors of this very house, as Lincoln grieved for his son and tried to imagine a way to keep his bloodied nation from tearing apart. For an instant, he could see Jefferson walking up the avenue (which was only a dusty thoroughfare in a city not yet built when he first came to this house). Jefferson was saying, again, that slavery would ring like a firebell in the night through the years to come.
By day, Washington was a dull town, where the wheels of bureaucracy ground steadily, monotonously on. At night, silence and muggers took over. Only at dusk, for a few minutes, the ghosts of history danced, and it was a magic place. Or perhaps that had just been in the overheated imagination of a sickly boy who read romantic stories and found the past a far better place to be.
He stepped out onto the grass and looked to his right, half-expecting the shadow — like the city’s ghosts — to be there, a specter in his peripheral vision, sliding away so quickly he did not really know if he saw it at all. For many years, nearly as long as he could remember, it had been there, dark, silent and certain. He had grown used to death being there. It had made him not mordant but casual. He often asked his friends what they thought was the best way to die, prodded them, when they were skittish, to continue. Death was not a chill companion, its touch was damp and warm.
He had felt it when he was swimming in the dark waters of the Pacific, after they shot his boat out from under him. When he was given the last rites of the Catholic Church after a back operation, the shadow was all around him, warm, deep and dark, the world a small point of light in the distance. He came back to the light, and to the world. His father thought the passage had made him invulnerable. His father had said to his friend, when the son was walking to the ocean’s edge, “God, Dave, did you see the legs on him! He’s got the legs of a fighter or a swimming champion. I know nothing can hurt him now, because I’ve stood by his deathbed three times, and each time I said good-bye to him, and each time he came back even stronger.”
He looked to his left. The shadow was not there. He was Irish enough to know that it would never move too far away, but he was also Irish enough to believe in luck. There was no moment he could name when he knew, it did not happen suddenly. But slowly, surely, he was beginning to believe it could belong to him.
He took several steps out into the garden and looked around. The future shimmered in the deep blue-pink haze, the shade of a lilac, that hung lightly over the city. It was not the place he had imagined would hold his destiny. When had his father’s dream become his own, exactly! No matter. Now, it was. He had been a boy longer than most men, well into his adult life, son of a father who at times seemed to grow so large he blotted out the sky. Now it was the son who cast the longer shadow. Inexplicably — it seemed to him at times a miracle — he had become one of the heroes in the books he had read as a thin, tired schoolboy with dark circles under his eyes. He was tall and strong and golden, and he would do battle with giants. It was nineteen hundred and sixty-three, and he was, at last, lucky.
His name was John Fitzgerald Kennedy.