Winter Kills (32 page)

Z. K. Dawson’s daughter met Tim Kegan in Washington when he was a young “bachelor senator” just three weeks after his nomination to the candidacy as President, three weeks before his official campaign for election began. It was so exciting for such a country girl. She had hardly ever left her daddy’s ranch—which surrounded Bryson, Texas—until she was fourteen. Daddy ran eight or ten thousand head of cattle as a tax gimmick. He wasn’t a rancher. He was an oil man: fields, pipelines, gas, refineries, tankers, gas stations, trucks and money. He had big oil and helium plants in Amarillo. He was heavy with grain elevators, zinc smelters, meat-packing and flour-milling in the Amarillo area. The ranch straddled the New Mexico border for hundreds of square miles on either side and swole out all over Deaf Smith County. It was just about the healthiest place in the world to raise a little girl.

Her culture was rounded off in three finishing schools in three altogether different European countries so she could have the power of talking foreign languages plus American and West Texan. Her daddy was as proud as proud can be (Pa said): “She sure as hell is entitled to a warm corner. She can speak Italian, French and German just like she was a wop, a frog or a kraut.”

When she was sixteen she was sent to school in Italy for two years, under the tutelage and protection of the Duchessa di Giorgio, who ran a school for five young
girls each year in different parts of the Italian peninsula, depending on the seasons. It was after the long series of operations, and she was a lovely child, with hair the color of an almond skin and eyes like laurel leaves. She was tall, with a wistfully faraway expression, yet with enormous animal vitality. Italy was her dream. Italy was the distilled adventure of all history. Italy was the romantic time of the world.

After two springs with the duchessa at Villa Somali, twenty-three kilometers from Venice on the Treviso road, then two summers at another Villa Somali (next door to the central residence of the late, thrilling Gabriele D’Annunzio Rapagnetta, Prince of Monte Nevoso, at Lago di Garda), two autumns at yet another Villa Somali at Siena to learn the supreme enunciation of the Italian language, and two winters in Rome at the Palazzo di Giorgio, she was no longer a virgin. The duchessa was firm, almost harsh, with her girls about virginity. She not only did not believe in it for young civilized women but she had two almost-elderly clients among the Black nobility who paid her well to deliver them.

One of these was a marchese, Luigi Debole, a diplomat who had served his country steadfastly in the Argentine, France and Yugoslavia, who had certain difficulties in sexual expression. Signorina Dawson’s youth meant a great deal to him, so much so that, on her nineteenth birthday, when he was sixty-two, they married in Rome in a civil ceremony that was accompanied by a marriage contract drawn by Daddy’s lawyers. In the contract it was stated that Signore Debole had an aversion to using his title, although it was acknowledged that his wife could use it after his death if that suited her.

After the wedding, Daddy, through the President and the Secretary of State, arranged to have the Deboles posted to Washington, where her beauty transfixed the diplomatic corps and the press.

What started her on being the first roundly educated member the family had ever had was the bad car accident she had with Daddy (Pa explained), which had nearly ruined her face. In less than a year she had recovered nicely from all the plastic operations, but Daddy couldn’t bear to look at her, because they wouldn’t have gotten into the accident at all if Daddy hadn’t been such a heavy drinking man in those days. She wouldn’t have been a fraction as lovely as those three Japanese surgeons made her if it hadn’t been for the accident. If she had looked the way she had been born to look, it seemed an easy thing to say that Tim would not have glanced twice in her direction, and very well might have had another shot at the Presidency after taking a four-year rest at the end of his second term.

But there had been the terrible accident. She had been sent away to school in Siena, Lausanne and Baden-Baden. She had married an Italian diplomat named Luigi Debole, who was always described in Washington society pages as “an older man.” The Deboles were assigned to the Italian Embassy in Washington because Daddy had explained to the President that it was something close to his heart.

Tim was never sure where it was they met in Washington. It would be fair to say that they met at about thirty cocktail parties, dinners, balls, late suppers, hunts, charity auctions and lunches that they both attended on a professional basis. Unknown to her, and for reasons of appeasing his own conscience, Daddy had hired the best, most accepted high-pressure public-relations firm in the country to undertake the job of establishing in print—as if it weren’t true unless it had been set and seen in print over and over again—that she was the most beautiful woman to grace official Washington since Evalina Hunt, daughter of the British ambassador in the time of the thirty-one day Harrison administration in 1841. Since he was a modern
man, it is possible that it was these repeated published claims measuring the extraordinary beauty of Signora Debole that first moved Tim to “pay attention” to her, rather than when, where or how often they had met. However, it was generally decided by both of them after the fun and games had gotten under way that they had been introduced by Lola Camonte at her “magnificent Georgetown house.” During this time Lola was hard at work as an erection engineer on Signore Debole. As an Italo-American, she was determined to be decorated by the Italian government for the undoubted effect it would have upon many key members of her own (invisible) organization.

Before the campaign started, Tim and Signora Debole had about eight days of callid copulating in a flat that the wily senator had rented for the purpose. Then he had to become inseparable from his entourage of press and politicians, and he found himself under total scrutiny. He had become almost physically addicted to her (and she to him). Pa noticed how distracted he was when he should have been giving all his attention to the campaign. He and Tim had a showdown about it, screaming at each other (in whispers) in Tim’s compartment on the plane, Pa attacking him obscenely for what he clearly saw to be a dangerous weakness, but Tim said he was just unable to accommodate Pa without any relief for himself. So a compromise was reached. Rockrimmon was named as the place of withdrawal to which the candidate would go whenever possible during the campaign and where, by common agreement with the press, he would be allowed to recharge his vigor without any encroachment by them. They watched every entrance and exit to the place, but they couldn’t get closer to the candidate than two miles. He never overdid it. Three days away from them was the most he was ever able to achieve, but each time he visited Rockrimmon Signora Debole would have been flown in by a small Jovair helicopter at least
twenty-four hours before the candidate’s arrival. The signora and her husband solemnly told each other that she needed to visit her father in Texas each time she had to be away with Tim.

An irreparable thing happened. Tim was able to transfer his physical addiction to six or so other ladies while, almost simultaneously and certainly against her will, Signora Debole fell hopelessly in love with him. It was not only irreparable. It was incompatible with serenity.

The time between his election and his inauguration, Tim reasoned, would be the logical time to let the signora cool off. He had had a lot of fun with her, even though in a confined way upon a small space, but now there was work to do (as opposed to what he had been doing in the Senate) and other beds to activate. From the beginning of his time with her he had said all the usual words, because she seemed to have become a passionate Italianate by adoption, utterly denying herself the laconics of an uncomplicated Texas girl in love. But the accident with Daddy in that terrible swaying, roaring car had turned her into an extraordinarily complicated woman. The awful fright of the long drive on the high mountain road with a drunken man at the wheel began it, and it never ended. If she dozed without the right drugs to put her completely to sleep with a wiped mind, that all came back to her. The pain throughout her body between the periods of oblivion brought by the morphine and the Demerol impressed itself upon the country-girl placidity she had been born with and changed all its smoothness into the contours of a serpentine nebula. Then the mysterious Japanese surgeons had appeared riding in on the carpet of Daddy’s money. A face, a new chest and legs, had been chosen for her from the arcane records of the faces and figures of wonderful fairies who lived amid the flowers of a child’s dream, and she had been transformed. Everyone soon came to see what the surgeons showed
them as being her. But she knew the molded flesh between the back of her eyes and the tip of her nose was not her. She was wearing a mask. She knew the perfect bosoms, more flawlessy sculpted than anything by Bernini, and the incomparable legs were a shell she had been packed into, a suit of armor that concealed the real plainness of a piano-legged, flat-chested, turnip-chinned country girl with teeth like a mouse’s and eyes so close together that they turned her full face into a profile. All the press carried on about her beauty, but she knew. Her husband rhapsodized about her beauty, but she knew. When Tim happened to her, she was liberated from the mean little prison of her surgery. In Tim’s arms, listening to him make love, she not only forgot all about what she had looked like once, but she didn’t care. She didn’t have to care. The most important man in the world wanted her and needed her so deeply and frantically that he could not understand how he survived when they were apart.

She asked him fifty times with many variations, “If I weren’t already married, would you marry me?” And Tim would say, “We’d be married right now if it weren’t for that.” She would dream about being married to Tim, then she would extend it, as any sheltered country girl from West Texas, raised purposely without a view of television or American magazines would do it. She fantasized becoming the First Lady of the Land. She would have to convert to do it, but she would attend his exotic church services with him every Sunday. She was a darned good cook, and she’d make them give her a private kitchen in the White House so Tim could find out what real bardele coi Morai and sucama-growl dumplings tasted like. She saw Tim for three days a month, at Rockrimmon, and she thought of nothing else but Tim for the rest of the time. She told her husband she had discovered wonderful health treatments at a new, inexpensive fat farm in Connecticut, and he patted her on the behind and waved good-bye,
having decided realistically that her little tussle with the almost-certain next President, as reported to him by his ambassador—with many protestations of how a young wife must be allowed to use her wings now and then—would essentially be good for Italo-American relations.

Then Tim got bored with sex games because there were so many other electrifying discoveries connected with the Presidency, and in his mind and body became as totally finished with Signora Debole as if they had never met. It was a brutal changeover. She was in multiple orgasm, dreaming edifying dreams of breaking wine bottles over the prows of new aircraft carriers—then she was alone on an iceberg drifting northward into the Arctic Sea. But she understood. She most certainly didn’t blame Tim. She knew it would be at least three weeks after the inauguration before she could see him again. She waited. She began to telephone the White House ten and twelve times a day, until Secret Service men appeared to say that someone had somehow gotten the use of her telephone and had been calling the White House to oppress the President. She threw everything in the room she could lift at them. She screamed. She tried to set fire to the drapes. Her maid, Pucinella, had to give her a bath and two Seconals to calm her down. When she felt strong enough she went to see her only real friend in Washington, Lola Camonte. She sat in the wicker armchair while Lola took a bath and she said, “I can’t sleep. I can’t eat. But I knew he was carrying the country on his back while he was learning a new job, so I was able to stand it.” They spoke in Italian, because Lola wanted to get all the practice she could, because after she got the decoration from the Italian government which this broad and her husband could get her, she was going to visit Italy and meet a lot of very important, aristocratic people. Let Frank Mayo and Ginzo Porchesa try a thing like that—and out on their ass in the Quirinale.

“I didn’t go near him at any of the receptions. He didn’t dare look at me when we were both in the same room at the White House, because he knew he would have had to drag me off to the Secret Service john, the way he used to. But I can’t keep this up. What am I going to do?”

“You look terrible.”

“I do?”

“You look absolutely terrible. Hasn’t your husband said anything to you?”

“About what?”

“About looking terrible.”

“He wouldn’t say it like that. But—yes—I think he did. He said perhaps I was overdieting.”

“The first thing is to get you physically back on your feet,” Lola said.

“How? I can’t think about things like that. All I can think about is Tim, Tim, Tim.”

“I’ll handle it. Say, have you heard anything around the embassy about the Order of Merit that Luigi said he was arranging for me?”

“How long can he go on this way? It must be tearing him apart. I just can’t get out of my mind the anguished picture of a man achieving his dream—the American Presidency—only to have it turn to ashes because he cannot be with the woman he loves.”

“Luigi already talked it over with the ambassador. They want to set me as a Commander of the Order, and I then wear the badge on a green, red and white bow. Come on! What is the use of crying? Give him a chance to get his administration started. Let him figure out how he is going to shake the newspapermen.”

Signora Debole was able to sustain herself admirably for exactly five more weeks. Then, when she saw Tim taking the wife of the Tanzanian chargé d’affaires into the Secret Service john, her mind snapped. She made a terrible scene at the Mother’s Day reception for the diplomatic corps which was instantly concealed from the
public, but was the scandal of the season among the people in those circles that mattered most to the President’s father.