“Yumpin’ Yiminy, now it’s a clambake!” yelled Sinatra. “More booze!” Another bottle materialized as the pack continued its run through the cemetery, minus Giancana and Fat Tony, who’d turned to walk back to their car. Charlie and Margaret stayed in place, leaning on a thick, slightly cracked tombstone.

“Irish exit,” Charlie said, motioning toward the departing mobsters.

“Not sure they’re Irish, honey. Did it tear your shirt?”

Charlie lifted his hand, revealing a small hole in his suit jacket. “That might have been there before,” he lied.

She poked her finger into the hole. “You’re bleeding,” she said. She held her finger up to capture whatever light she could steal from the moon. “We should go back to the car, see if we need to take you to a hospital.”

“Oh, c’mon,” said Charlie, who still had shrapnel in his chest from World War II. “I’m fine.”

His shoulder might be fine, but Margaret knew that Charlie was not. He slept poorly and drank too much and worked too many hours. He often lost his temper over trivial things, and she worried about how to deal with it. Eighteen years earlier, Charlie had experienced the horrors of war, fighting the Krauts in France after D-Day, and in the past few years Margaret was often reminded of the army’s slogan that “every man has his breaking point.” She was constantly looking for ways to prevent Charlie from reaching his. Whatever the doctors were labeling it, combat exhaustion or combat neurosis or battle fatigue, Margaret knew it would be with him forever. Beyond that, his life in Congress, where he’d been for almost a decade now, was infinitely frustrating—accomplishing anything good required Sisyphean efforts, while ethical compromises were everywhere. And at some point along the way, Charlie found that the constant fundraising and glad-handing to stay in office for his New York constituents had begun to eclipse the work itself.

Ahead, the members of the Rat Pack and their hangers-on were oblivious to the Marders’ concerns; they were soaked in bourbon, singing, laughing, and loudly gossiping about ghosts as they stumbled around the graveyard. Charlie and Margaret could make out pieces of their conversations.

There goes Wallace Beery.

He won an Oscar too, Frank!

Remember he and a couple mobsters beat that guy to death at the Troc?

Suzan Ball.

Lucille’s cousin.

Twenty-one?

Cancer.

Bit parts. Aladdin and His Lamp.

Here’s the Garden of Memory.

Some reverence, folks, Bogie is over there.

Bogart, Sinatra’s hero, was credited with coining the term Rat Pack to describe an altogether different group of friends, but both the term and Bogie’s beloved Lauren Bacall had been posthumously co-opted by his protégé Sinatra.