The Thomas Berryman Number

“Terrell,” I heard when I finally picked it up. “That shitheel, cocksucker Terrell.”

The distant voice on the phone was Lewis Rosten’s. It wasn’t Rosten’s normal speaking voice, though. Rosten was rarely if ever vulgar.

I tried to knock a cigarette out of a pack and four or five tumbled out.

“What about Terrell?”

“Ochs,

Hurley Wynn is Terrell’s man.

He’s his lawyer. He’s from Houston is the reason nobody knew him.”

Rosten had started to shout. He was very happy. I was nervously lighting up one of the cigarettes.

“You did it this time, you smart bastard,” I heard. “Reed says he could and will kiss your ass on television. Your sweet ass.”

Somebody else was on the line. Happy rebel yells was who it was.

I was holding the receiver away from my ear, starting to giggle like the big fucking village idiot.

More people came on the line with congratulations.

“How did it break?” I kept asking each new voice. “How did it break?”

“Complicated.” I eventually got Lewis back. “Some friend of Reed’s is from Houston. Who cares!”

I was just beginning to figure out the ramifications and I couldn’t believe it. It seemed so perfectly right and logical.

Johnboy Terrell.

“Let me have some damn enthusiasm,” quiet little Rosten yelled over the phone.

I obliged him. I went partially, happily berserk at Hojo’s in West Hampton, Long Island.

I gave out some rebel hoots and howls that had people knocking at me through the motel walls. I crowhopped around the rug on my big bare feet. I kicked the walls like somebody on their way home from

Singin’ in the Rain.

Before I go any farther, though, I should tell you that during the years 1958 to 1962 Terrell was governor of the state; that from about 1958 on, Terrell had just about run Tennessee; and that some people, myself included, thought that he had run it very, very badly.

What’s more, Terrell certainly had a major grudge to settle with Jimmie Horn.

That night, my batteries all recharged, I wrote up a long, inspired list of follow-up calls and visits I still had to make in the North. For the very first time, I felt totally comfortable with the story.

I prepared for a trip out to Berryman’s summer house in a place called Hampton Bays. It was there that I was to make my one big mistake in judgment while recording this story.

PART III

The Girl Who Loved Thomas Berryman

Hampton Bays, July 20

Thomas Berryman’s house at Hampton Bays was a sprawling, storm-gray sea captain’s house with a long canopied porch and five hundred feet of private beachfront. There were separate garages all over the place. The garages were literally everywhere you looked.

Inside the ten-bedroom house I found an unexpected surprise: Berryman’s girlfriend, a strange, beautiful lady named Oona Quinn.

A modern woman I guess you could call her, Oona Quinn was growing up in the manner of young men: she was groping, grappling, scratching for what she considered her rightful place in the world. That’s why Thomas Berryman liked her, I imagine.

Oona is tall and thin. (5’9”, big bones, 130 pounds.) She has flowing black hair that can come below her waist, but she generally keeps it up in a large bun. She has the classic, stately look of New England, and the best of it. She’ll smoke brown cigarettes, however, letting them hang out of the side of her mouth.

Unlike Ben Toy, Oona was the kind of person I’d known in my own life. She’d been a clerk in a boutique the spring and winter before she met Berryman. But she was bright with common sense. She was the one, for example, who finally gave me a reasonable explanation why

beautiful people

are forever hugging. She said it was their way of breaking sexual tensions. I liked that idea.

Oona Quinn said she was twenty, and that was a startling, but possible, fact.

I first saw her through a screen door, a black, dirty screen in the kitchen. I had my eyes and nose up against it and the shadowy outline of her hair was wild and bushy. A beautiful witch, I thought. I called inside.

During our first moments in the doorway—as I explained how I’d come to the house via Ben Toy—I scratched my nose, took a deep breath, scratched my chin, my ear, blinked several times, brushed the shoulder of my jacket, and lit a cigarette.

“Haven’t you ever seen a woman before?” she asked. I laughed (embarrassing memory) and said, “Uh course.”

At the outset, Oona was reluctant to talk about anything—even the kind of day it was, or wasn’t, or ought to be. This didn’t surprise me, of course.

We walked down to the water on a gray picket fence that was laid flat instead of standing up. She carried a little kitchen radio that was playing cabaret songs, and it was almost as if I wasn’t there.

After we’d tramped a good distance from the house she asked me some questions. “What … exactly what did Ben Toy tell you?” she said.