Top Down by Jim Lehrer Page A

his sweetheart.
    “I turned away from him and ran from the room.”
    Marti put her hands on the top of the station wagon’s steering wheel and cried and cried. I leaned over and put an arm over her shoulders and pulled her my way.
    “It was two days before I could stand to look at him, my poor sick daddy,” Marti said after a while. “We’ve talked a little but I have still—in ten days—to really touch him.”
    N OW IT WAS my turn to see Van Walters. Almost, but not quite yet. Marti had a plan.
    “Let’s not tell anybody—except Dad, of course—that you’re a reporter” were Marti’s last instructions as we prepared to get out of the car at her grandmother’s house.
    “I can’t do that,” I said. “The
Tribune
has a policy against interviewing news sources under false pretenses.”
    “Are you or are you not here to help my dad?” she asked sternly.
    “Sure, you bet, sure,” said I, telling what I believed—hoped, honestly—was only a half lie.
    She shot back: “Remember, please, there are no news sources here or anywhere else involved in this—right now, at least. This is personal.”
    Personal? Okay, okay. “But how do we explain who I am and why I’m here?” I said quickly.
    “You’re my new boyfriend.”
    I smiled. So did she. “Aren’t I a bit too old for you?”
    “How old
are
you?”
    “Thirty,” I said. “You?”
    “Twenty. But no problem. Fortunately, I look older than I am and you look younger than you are.”
    That was not true. Or was it? Maybe, I let it go. I was learning quickly that she had a way of getting what she wanted.
    “We’ll tell everybody that we met at Penn,” she said. “You’re a Hemingway scholar working on a master’s.”
    There was a lie that I could live with—if not huff and puff about.
    R OSEMARY W ALTERS REALLY was as attractive a woman as Marti had described. I had a brief introductory chat with her when we got inside the house. But there was an inanimate quality to her that was unexpected. Marti seemed so full of energy and action while her mother seemed completely out of energy and disinterested in action. Also, there were signs of the havoc of drinking in Rosemary Walters’s skin and eyes. There was a smell of liquor on her though she was not drunk. I was hit—suddenly, unexpectedly—by a wave of sympathy and understanding for this woman, knowing as I did the details of what Marti had told me she’d been through with her damaged, dying husband. Every minute of their five years together since the assassination must have been a desperate existence for both of them.
    I only exchanged quick hellos with everyone else on the way up to the bedroom I was assigned. Marti gave me a quick pass-by introduction to an elderly woman who was her grandmother but to no one else.
    I knew Marti’s dad was somewhere in the house, but clearly I was not to see him until later.
    The huge white frame three-story house seemed to have dozens of rooms, most of them small. Mine was only slightly larger than the cubbyhole I’d slept in as a marine lieutenant at a makeshift bachelor officer’s quarters on Okinawa in 1960.
    Marti finalized my orders of the day while escorting me to my room. Dr. Reynolds, the psychiatrist, was driving in from Boston and was due in Kinderhook shortly. She wanted us both to meet and talk privately with him before I met her dad. It was much too cold to talk outside and, while there were plenty of private places in the family house, Marti wanted the chat to happen somewhere else. So, on her mother’s suggestion, they would meet in a quiet corner of the Dutch Reformed Church in the center of town.
    “Mom said it’s always open and kept warm for anyone who wants to come in, but she said nobody much ever does,” Marti explained. “We should have complete privacy.”
    And we did. A sign outside told me the church was organized in 1677; the current sanctuary, the last of a couple of rebuildings, had been there since 1869. It was warm and