It was only then that Claude Betancourt realized the real reason for his summons to the inner court of what survived of Camelot.
The Administration wanted to tell him a real secret; a secret it that Jack Kennedy had decided that he needed to hear from his lips.
The old man sighed.
Kids!
They would be trying to teach him to steal candy from babies next!
Chapter 38
It was the first time Miranda Sullivan had been to church for about three years and it was a thoroughly disorientating experience. An experience made no less bewildering by the fact that she had never, ever imagined she would find herself in a communion so emotionally — ecstatically for many worshippers — wrapped up and dedicated to their Lord. Initially, she had been intimidated, later fascinated and by the end spiritually wrung out.
Having been brought up as an occasional Episcopalian in a household where religion was an optional buffet rather than an al la carte menu, she had never gone along with the supreme being thing. However, that was not to say that she was in any way agnostic. It made perfect sense to her that the chaos of the physical world around her would benefit from some kind of guiding hand; and sometimes it was comforting to contemplate that there might actually be something, or someone watching over her. Ancient civilizations had posited the concept of the ‘Earth Mother’, eastern esoteric belief systems spoke of ‘karma’, and of philosophical mantras that talked to balance, yin and yang, fire and water. What child could look up into a starry night and not wonder if he or she was really alone in the vastness of the Universe? Notwithstanding she did not actually believe in the God of the Old Testament, or Jesus, the second coming of the Messiah or in the Kingdom of Heaven.
To her own surprise the least disorientating thing about the long, noisy, fervent, essentially musical experience — ‘service’ was too small a word to describe what she had just lived through — was not that she had been surrounded by black faces or even that she had been so warmly welcomed, feted almost, but that she emerged from the Third Baptist Church changed. Not in any huge way; because that was how she was hard-wired and there had been no unmistakable moment of Damascene conversion. No, it was simply that in some indefinable way she had opened her eyes to another way of thinking and of looking at the world around her.
In the last few weeks she had totally immersed herself in the work of the California Civil Rights Forum. In the process she had become a little divorced from the rest of the staff in the Office of the Governor of California in Sacramento, spending much of her time, trips down to Los Angeles and San Diego excepted, in San Francisco and Oakland. She had initially planned to be on the road most days but Terry Francois, the wise attorney who was President of the San Francisco chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People — the NAACP — had counselled her to avoid spreading herself too thinly. Especially, this early in the ‘program’. The thing was to build solid foundations so as to be able to construct future structures on firm ground. Basically, Rome was not built in a day.
‘Lincoln proclaimed the end of slavery a hundred years ago but look how far we have come?’ He had observed sagely. ‘Patience. We must be patient. The history of the civil rights movement tells us that nothing comes quickly or easily.’
Miranda had found herself the center of attention outside the church and was glad when eventually, Dwayne John touched her arm and guided her onto a less congested area of sidewalk.
“Thank you,” she said.
The big man smiled quizzically.
“For what?”
“For allowing me to share that…”
Even in the Fillmore District a black man and white woman attracted curious and now and then, hostile looks, especially when the black man was a towering handsome man in his twenties with the build and demeanour of a heavyweight in training, and the woman was blond, willowy and had inherited the god-given good looks of her movie star parents.
Those looks, insofar as the couple noticed them at all, troubled neither the man nor the woman for they were intuitively relaxed in each other’s company and content in their slowly developing friendship. So much so that neither of them really thought about — nor would give any significance to if they did — their first drug-blurred encounter on the night of the October War. On that dark day they had been disturbed mid-coitus by Johnny Seiffert, the owner of the house on Haight Street in which they had been having sex. Well, fucking really because the people that they had become since that night no longer associated what they had been doing on Johnny Seiffert’s red-sheeted ‘love altar’, with anything remotely to do with having mutually pleasurable consensual sex, and a million miles away from anything which might be called ‘making love’. In any event they had ended up looking down the barrel of Johnny’s Navy Colt half-dressed on the streets of San Francisco in the middle of a nuclear war. All in all, their impromptu ‘first date’ on the evening of 27th October 1962 had not gone very well! That was then and this was now, fifteen-and-a-half months later. Dwayne had been born again; while Miranda, with a lot of help from her Aunt Molly and Uncle Harvey, had got her shit together and they were no longer recognisably the same people they had been at the end of October 1962.
Several members of the communion had invited the couple back to their homes for a meal; Miranda was not ready for that and she suspected that Dwayne was grateful she had politely claimed a ‘prior engagement’, citing her Aunt and Uncle and alluding to ‘catching up with my brother Gregory’.
Actually, catching up with Gregory had turned out to be an unexpectedly fraught business around Christmas time. Turning up unannounced at her brother’s apartment in Sausalito — a top floor garret as opposed to something she would describe as ‘an apartment’ — Darlene Lefebure had answered the door, hair askew and positively glowing in the way that one often does after great sex.
Miranda’s Aunt Molly had explained that Darlene was staying away a few days with a girlfriend in Oakland when she had called at her Aunt and Uncle’s old house on Nob Hill. She had been mightily relieved that Darlene was not around because on their previous meetings she and Darlene had brought out the absolute worst in each other. Darlene had been convinced Miranda had stolen Dwayne from her and subsequently poisoned his mind against her; and Dwayne had not helped the situation by avoiding any kind of encounter with his former girlfriend. This still irritated Miranda a little even though she knew it was undiluted shame — probably misplaced — on his part that kept him away from Darlene.