plants gave a lush feeling to every corner of the room, and the framed Pollocks offered testament to the worth of human creativity. Amusingly, and with perfect appropriateness, one block of wall space was devoted to a photographic blowup of a horse bedecked with flowers: Chateaugay, in the winner’s circle after the Kentucky Derby.
'All yours, buddy,' Frank said, smiling.
Jeff was touched by what his friend had done. 'Frank, it’s fantastic!'
''Course, anything you don’t like, we can change right away. Designer understands it’s all preliminary—you have to approve it. After all, you’re the one’s gotta work in here.'
'Everything’s great just as it is. I’m astounded. And you can’t tell me some designer came up with the idea of that picture of Chateaugay.'
'No,' Frank admitted, 'that was my suggestion. Thought you might get a kick out of it.'
'It’ll give me inspiration.'
'That’s what I’m counting on.' Frank laughed. 'Jesus, when I think how fast all this has happened, how—Well, you know what I mean.' The moment of boyish glee was retracted as quickly as it had appeared. This whole experience was aging Frank: the unspoken and unanswerable questions, the shockingly sudden and inexplicable success … It was all more than he could readily deal with.
'Anyway,' Frank said, looking away toward the empty reception area, 'I’ve got a whole pile of stuff to take care of today. Ordered a bunch of the new office calculators from Monroe; they should have been here two days ago. So if you want to just settle in here a bit, get a feel for the place…'
'It’s all right, Frank; you go ahead. I’d very much like to sit here and think for a while. And thanks again. You’re doing a terrific job—partner.'
They shook hands, clapped each other on the shoulder in a self-conscious gesture of camaraderie. Frank strode away toward the near-empty offices, and Jeff eased himself into the enfolding comfort of the Barcelona chair behind the massive desk.
It had all been so easy, easier even than he’d imagined. The races, the inning-by-inning replays of the World Series games … and with the huge amount of capital accumulated from those sure-thing bets, there was no limit to what he could do now, with equal or greater ease.
He’d already begun studying stock prices, reviewing what he knew of the world to come and applying that knowledge to an extrapolation of the current market situation. He couldn’t remember every dip and rise of the economy for all those years, but he was certain he had enough general insight to make consideration of minor recessions and setbacks irrelevant.
Some investments were obvious: IBM, Xerox, Polaroid. Others took a bit more thought, connecting in his mind social changes already underway or soon to come with the companies that would benefit from those changes. The rest of the decade, Jeff knew, would be a time of general prosperity, with Americans traveling widely for business or amusement; Future, Inc. should invest heavily in hotel and airline stocks. Similarly, Boeing Aircraft had to be in for a long upswing, even though the much-vaunted SST program would soon be canceled; the 727 and 747, neither announced yet, would become the primary commercial planes of the next twenty-five years. Other aerospace companies would have their own successes and failures, and Jeff felt sure some careful research would help jog his memory as to which had been awarded the most lucrative contracts for the Apollo program, and, ultimately, to build the space-shuttle fleet.
He gazed down at the Hudson, thick with commerce. The Japanese auto invasion would be a long time coming, as he’d noticed on that first day, and America was near the peak of its love affair with big cars; it couldn’t hurt to put a million or so into Chrysler, GM, and Ford. RCA would probably be a good short-term choice, too, since color television was about to become the standard, and it would be many years before Sony made its devastating inroads into that market.
Jeff closed his eyes, giddy from the potential of it all. The monthly financial crises he had once endured, the lifelong frustration of jobs with too much responsibility and too little pay, were now concerns not only of the past, but of a future that would never be. Who cared how this had come to pass? He was young, he was wealthy, and he would soon be immeasurably richer still. He had no wish to change any of that or even question it, much less go back to that other reality he had lived or perhaps imagined. Now he could have everything he’d ever wanted, and the time and energy to enjoy it all.
'… whether the Republican nominee is Goldwater or Rockefeller. The Baker scandal is unlikely to have any serious effect on the president’s reelection bid, although a
'Can’t we watch something else?' Sharla pouted. 'I don’t know why you care so much about all this political stuff anyway. It’s a whole year before the next election.'
Jeff gave her an appeasing half-smile but didn’t answer.
'… tax cut and civil-rights bills. Unless they are enacted before Congress adjourns on December twentieth, the proposals will face an even tougher uphill battle in the spring sessions of the House and Senate, and Kennedy would be forced to begin the campaign in the shadow of continued congressional battle rather than in his hoped-for aura of dual victory.'
Sharla uncurled herself from the sofa in a silent huff, walked toward the stairs that led to the upper levels of the East Seventy-third Street town house. 'I’ll be waiting for you in bed,' she called over her shoulder, bare in the peach-colored filmy nightgown. 'That is, if you’re still interested.'
'… despite ongoing criticism of the Bay of Pigs disaster, despite bitter problems with such disparate entities as the AFL-CIO and the steel industry, the image and the man remain inseparable for the majority of the public. His windswept youthfulness, his charming wife and devoted children, the tragedies and triumphs his family has survived, the easy grace and ready sense of humor, all—'
Jeff ran back the tape on the prototype Sony VTR that had cost him over eleven thousand dollars and was doomed to failure, a product a decade ahead of its time. The black-and-white file-footage clips of John Kennedy lit the screen a second time, so familiar and yet still heart-rending: grinning in his famous rocking-chair, scooping John-John and Caroline into his arms on an airport runway, romping with his brothers on the beach at Hyannisport. So many times Jeff had seen these brief public segments of the man’s life; and always, for a quarter of a century, they had been followed by the open limousine in Dallas, the frenzied horror, the blood on Jackie’s clothes and the roses in her arms. But no such images existed now. Tonight, on this tape of a news show broadcast not two hours before, there would be no photograph of Lyndon Johnson assuming the mantle of power, no funeral cortege through Washington, no Eternal Flame at the fade-out. Tonight the man of whom they spoke was alive, vital, full of plans for his own future and that of the nation.
'… grace and ready sense of humor, all lend at least superficial weight to the notions of a New Frontier, a fresh beginning … the advent, as some would have it, of a modern-day Camelot. It is this enormously positive image, rather than any solid record of first-term accomplishments, that the newly appointed Kennedy reelection team will have to work with. Sorensen, O’Donnell, Salinger, O’Brien, and Bobby Kennedy are all well aware of their candidate’s strengths and weaknesses, and of the power of instant myths. You may be sure they know where to concentrate their attention in the upcoming campaign.'
The newscast switched to a shot of Charles de Gaulle visiting the Shah of Iran amid much pomp and circumstance, and Jeff turned off the machine. Kennedy alive, he thought, as he had thought so often in the past few weeks. Kennedy leading the nation toward who knew what—continued prosperity, racial harmony, an early disengagement from Vietnam?
John F. Kennedy alive. Until three weeks from now.
Unless, unless … what? The fantasy was irresistible, outlandish and even cliched though it might be. But this was no television drama, no science-fiction plot; Jeff was here, in this as-yet-unshattered world of 1963, with the greatest tragedy of the era about to unfold before his too-knowing eyes. Was it possible that he might intervene, and would it be proper? He had already begun to wreak major changes
