No longer recognizing the truth when he hears it, John Lyon sees little point in joining the debate played out in front of him, a producer and an editor arguing about the wording for a twenty-second piece on the national debt.
“Three minutes to air!”
The producer and editor come to an agreement, certain words struck, phrases changed — rearranging grains of sand on the beach, Lyon thinks.
Sliding the pages toward him, the producer asks, “Okay with you, John?”
“Sure,” he replies without having read either the original version or this newly edited one.
The producer and editor exchange looks: His Lordship can’t be bothered. They think Lyon is haughty because he’s overly enamored of his background, coming as he does from Old Money and private schools. But Lyon’s aloofness is in fact his protection. His family was like the huge, many-turreted house in which he grew up: pristinely white and forbidding on the outside but crumbling and wormed-through at its very center.
As the producer and editor wait for Lyon to say something, he refuses to look at either of them and they eventually move off, the editor saying, just loudly enough for Lyon to hear, “No wonder he doesn’t have anything going for him here at the network.”
What John Lyon does have going for him at age fifty — eight years writing for newspapers, eleven years with local stations, ten years at the network — is a reliability that approaches the absolute. Able to take over any assignment no matter how late he’s brought in, no matter how little preparation he is given, on camera Lyon is un-rattle-able, a rock.
He’s been called in to read the news this particular Sunday afternoon because an ambitious young field correspondent who was supposed to fill in for the vacationing anchor suffered an attack of appendicitis just thirty minutes before the broadcast was to begin. By the time Lyon was contacted and limo-rushed to the studio, there were only eight minutes to air — but here he sits behind the anchor’s desk, his makeup being applied, sipping coffee, waiting for the final clean copy to be printed out, and looking for all the world as if this is just another day of the office.
“Do you know who you remind me of?”
He’s never worked with this makeup person before but Lyon knows what she’s going to say. William Holden. People have always commented on the resemblance but more so in the past five years. Lyon usually expresses surprise, claiming he doesn’t see it himself. He is, however, secretly pleased, not because Holden was considered handsome, but because Lyon admired the innate dignity which that actor brought to the roles he played.
“Bill Holden,” the woman says.
“Really?”
“Yeah. My mother did makeup in Hollywood and I met him once when I was a little girl. Tragic the way he ended up though, wasn’t it? Fell down drunk, hit his head, they found him with his pants around his ankles. Or was that Errol Flynn?”
“Two minutes to air!”
When the clean copy is handed to him, Lyon reads it over and then stares into camera one, barely seven feet from his face. But something about one of the stories bothers him. Lyon flips back through the pages and then calls a producer, Nancy Greene, over to the desk.
“Are these figures right?” Lyon asks, pointing at the copy.
Hell of a time to be asking, Greene thinks as she leans near Lyon’s shoulder to read. “Yeah, unfortunately they are. More than a thousand children killed each year in reported child abuse cases, with another thousand — three each day — estimated killed in cases that go unreported.”
Lyon is still troubled.
“In the unreported cases,” Greene explains, “cause of death is usually listed as accident or illness. You die under unusual circumstances as an adult, you get an autopsy. But a lot of states, especially in the South, order an autopsy in only one out of three children’s deaths.”
“One minute!”
Seeing that Lyon is still frowning, the producer asks, “Okay?”
“No,” he replies sarcastically, “it’s not okay that two thousand children a year are murdered in this country.”
She flushes red. “I know that’s not okay, John, what I meant was —”
Still looking down at the copy, he holds up a hand, dismissing her.
Gritting her teeth and growling under her breath, Greene heads for the control room where she finds the pace running at its usual level of hysteria, one feed from San Francisco — slated for use in the second half of the newscast — not even in yet. Greene walks over to stand behind the senior producer, a perpetually worried man who glances at the monitor showing Lyon’s placid face and wonders if anything at any point in Lyon’s life has ever given him the nervous sweats. This afternoon, however, the senior producer is particularly grateful for Lyon’s icy demeanor.
Lyon pulls his suitcoat down and tightens his tie. He can’t stop thinking about the story on murdered children. Jesus, such filth out there. Six children a day murdered by their parents or their parents’ friends or by relatives or baby-sitters — and half of those deaths not even reported as murders? A horror show. Lyon doesn’t have any children of his own, never married. A week after he turned fifty, just three months ago, his best friend, Tommy Door, died and now …
Lyon shakes his head. Why the hell am I thinking about all this when I’m going on camera in a few seconds? He looks at the people running around on the set, all of them so damn frenetic, so self-important, overly ambitious, and … But Lyon also forces that thought to drift away unfinished. He has noticed lately a tendency in himself toward bitterness, which he finds unattractive and makes a conscious effort to curb.
“Thirty seconds!”
Lyon repeats the straightening of his suitcoat, the tightening of his tie — and then once more stares into camera one. But his famous face is no longer placid.
In the control room, producer Nancy Greene is staring at a monitor showing that face, Lyon’s expression causing her stomach to tighten. She stands there with the fingers of one hand nervously tapping her lips.
Two years ago Greene had a six-week affair with Lyon. She instigated it and she ended it, no closer to understanding Lyon at the end of those six weeks than she was at the beginning. Most of the men she’s slept with eventually revealed to her a personality distinctive from the one they used out in the world. A hard-charging cynic in the office turns out to be surprisingly sentimental and timid with his lover. Or just the opposite, a shy man in public becomes aggressive or even violent in bed. John Lyon, however, never yielded any secrets. He made love the way he reads the news: proficiently but without ever putting his heart into it. Greene never did see behind his facade, concluding finally that there was no facade: Lyon is icy through and through.
Why then does his face look so strange right now, almost anguished? Or is it her imagination? She grabs a nearby shirtsleeve and indicates the monitor. “Does he look all right to you?”
“Like the iron man he is,” comes the technician’s distracted reply.
Like he’s about to cry, Greene thinks. She’s tempted to open Lyon’s Interruptible Feedback and ask him if he’s okay, but if this causes a disruption right here at the beginning of the broadcast and Lyon turns out to be all right, Greene will spend the rest of her career working on public service programming.
Her stomach tightens all the harder and her fingers tap all the faster when Lyon is given the cue, camera one’s red light coming on, the newscast launching — Nancy Greene listening carefully for a catch in Lyon’s voice but hearing only the modulated tones of a consummate professional.
As he continues reading the news she continues watching his eyes. Am I going crazy, Greene wonders, or are they really filling with tears? Something is catching the studio lights and causing those blue eyes to glisten. Why hasn’t anyone else noticed? Too busy doing their jobs. Nothing I can do about it now, Greene decides.
Two minutes and thirty-three seconds into this Sunday June 24 afternoon newscast, toward the end of that item about the national debt, John Lyon becomes consciously aware of it himself: he’s going to cry. This sudden realization astonishes him into silence. Lyon pauses and looks dead into camera one, his normally viewer-comfortable face put out of kilter by the queerest of expressions.
The silence causes people on the set and in the control booth to stop what they’re doing, most of them thinking at first that there must be a problem with the sound system. But then they look at Lyon or at monitors showing Lyon’s face and see that the reason they don’t hear anything is that Lyon isn’t speaking.
In the control booth, the senior producer screams the question that’s on everyone’s mind: “What the hell’s wrong with him!”
Nancy Greene is the only one with an answer. “He’s going to cry.” Now everyone is looking at her with fierce expressions, as if it’s all Greene’s fault. She shrugs.
Then Lyon ends that strange six-second pause, shakes off the queer expression, and finishes the item about the national debt. On the set and in the control booth a collective breath is released.
Lyon himself, however, remains horribly aware that the urge to cry has not left him. It is, in fact, growing stronger and, with a sense of on-the-air panic that is new to him, Lyon realizes that very shortly it’s going to happen, really happen — he is going to bust out crying right here, on camera, on live network television. Lyon doesn’t know what to do about it except soldier on and hope against the inevitable.
Exactly two minutes and forty-four seconds into his newscast, Lyon begins reading the piece about the number of children under the age of nine who, experts say, are murdered each year but whose deaths are officially listed as caused by accidents or illnesses — an average of three each day.
Nine seconds into this item, John Lyon sobs.
His immediate reaction is embarrassed surprise, as if he had just belched. Lyon closes his mouth and forcibly presses his lips together, which only increase the pressure of what has come alive inside of him, clawing to get out, unavoidable, irresistible, and finally escaping, rendering Lyon quite helpless as he sits behind the news desk and sobs a second time, those wet eyes now over-flowing with tears, his face gripped by what seems to millions of television viewers a sadness altogether soul-deep, wretched, inconsolable.
But then, incredibly, Lyon steels himself against this emotional firestorm and stumbles through a few more sentences about the murder of children before the director finally manages — mercifully — to cut away to a commercial.
Members of the crew rush to Lyon’s side.
“What’s wrong?”
He is doubled up as if in pain, still sobbing.
“John! Is it your heart?”
Having rushed to the set from the control booth, Nancy Greene is kneeling beside him with her hands on his left arm. “Let me help you up, John. Come on, we have to move you someplace where you can lie down.” Actually her assignment is to get Lyon the hell off the set before the commercial ends. She signals to a sound technician to grab Lyon’s other arm. But they can’t get him to stand. Greene steps back and calls for more help.
Lyon’s removal from the set turns out to be an effort requiring four producers and crew members who finally half-carry, half-drag him away. Not that he is resisting them. It’s just that John Lyon is crying so hard he can’t hold himself upright.