Jackie, page 24
Jack and I are out for a drive in the Lincoln, windows rolled halfway down, sunshine moving through the car. Green hedges, manicured lawns, and low stucco houses flow by.
“Jack, I didn’t invite Mary.”
“Is her name on the list?”
“You didn’t put it there?”
He shrugs, and I know then the talk I’ve heard about Jack and Mary Meyer is true.
“You and I both enjoy Mary’s company,” he says.
I feel a surge of rage. He makes a turn, heading back toward Palm Beach. Sunlight blinding off the hood. We drive in silence. There was a look I saw exchanged between Jack and Mary the last time we were all together. Mary had come to the Residence with Tony. She was wearing a shirtdress and those hammered-gold earrings she often wore, which seemed too large for her face but always made you look again. A year after we were married, Jack and I moved next door to Mary and her then-husband, Cord Meyer. Jack had known Mary since they were in school together at Choate. Mary and I would sometimes take walks through Georgetown and along the canal path. Then Mary’s son was struck by a car and killed. He was nine. Her marriage split up. We’d seen her less after that. Until recently.
I unroll the window farther and close my eyes.
* * *
—
The following day, I strike her name from the guest list.
“I had Pam call her,” I tell Jack, “to explain our space constraints. Eugene Black and his wife invited so many of their own friends, but since the dinner is in their honor, we really have no choice. Mary is still coming for the dancing at ten, so you can end it with her face-to-face.”
He stares at me. He doesn’t say anything.
“It’s not that I can’t handle it, Jack. Don’t you see? It becomes unbearable to me when I think about what Caroline and John will have to endure when it gets out, because it will, someday, get out. You know that. And in my mind, I see their faces. The burning disappointment and the shame. I think about that.”
He sits down, silent.
“It’s not the women I’m afraid of, Jack. For someone as canny as you, you seem blind about this. I find it stunning you don’t realize that someday, some writer, like a Mailer, is going to come along and blow the whole house down. And Caroline will come to you, or to me, and she will say, Is it true? Or, worse, she will look at you differently and won’t say anything at all.”
I pick up the seating chart I’ve been working on, my pen and notebook, and walk out.
Jack
Two days later, he finds the photograph she left on his desk. Under a folder but positioned intentionally with the edge peeking out. She wanted him to find it. A photograph of her father holding hands with another woman while her mother dressed in riding clothes sits on the fence next to them, staring fixedly away.
* * *
—
He’d seen the photograph before. Jackie showed it to him once, years ago. She said that by the time it was taken, her mother had decided it didn’t matter what her father did. She’d accepted her marriage for what it was. He can’t quite remember the words Jackie used when she told him this. Only that, years later, she came across that photograph and understood everything she thought she’d known as a child in a new and awful light.
* * *
—
Outside the window behind his desk is the Rose Garden. Caroline and John are tramping through the snow near an unfinished snowman; a hat, a pipe, and a carrot, some black pieces of something scattered on the frozen surface. Caroline has gotten distracted. She’s standing over an angel she made, studying the outline among the mess of shapes.
Spring 1963
On the night of the dinner dance for Eugene Black, president of the World Bank, the grounds are covered in snow that fell throughout the day. As music drifts through the rooms, I notice Mary Meyer, on the arm of Jack’s friend Blair Clark. She wears a layered dress, chiffon, a swish of pastel, too light, like she skipped a season. Tony tells me the dress once belonged to their great-grandmother.
I see Mary and Jack disappear. In less than five minutes, Jack’s back. I can tell by how he moves and talks that he drew a line through it. Later, I’ll learn that Mary stumbled around in the snow outside for over an hour before she came back inside, that thin dress soaked, her hair tangled, face streaked with the wet and the cold. It’s when I see the expression on Mary’s face that I know for certain Jack did what I asked him to do.
* * *
—
In early April, I drive out to survey the work on the house we’re building in Middleburg. The house we’ll call Wexford. It’s the fields I love—the view looking out toward the Blue Ridge Mountains, the rolling expanse under a gorgeous sky.
We bought the land in November, and I’d started on the designs. I tore out pages from magazines and sketched out a floor plan: one level, so Jack won’t have to climb stairs; a simple kitchen; French doors; a terrace.
“It’s going to be perfect,” I tell Jack when I show him the architect’s plans.
“Not as palatial as I was expecting.”
“It has all these little spaces,” I say, “separate rooms, so we can get away from one another and do what we need to do. You can have your meetings. I can paint, write letters, read. The children have their play space and a place to nap. And please don’t worry, Jack. The dining room will have the Louis XVI chairs. I don’t want you to think I’ve lost my taste for the extravagant, just because I’ve spent time in the White House bomb shelter.”
* * *
—
The day after Easter, Pierre Salinger reads the statement to the press Pam and I crafted:
…expecting a baby…the latter part of August…Mrs. Kennedy has maintained her full schedule of the past few months…. Her physicians have now advised her to cancel all of her official activities.
So there it is.
* * *
—
That spring, Jack and I spend weekends with the children at Camp David. From there, we take the convertible out to visit battlefields of the Civil War—Gettysburg, Antietam—the Secret Service car trailing a distance behind. We talk about tensions in the South, demonstrations, pickets and arrests, King’s letter from Birmingham jail, and the Children’s Crusade in early May.
The footage from that was horrific. Children’s skin torn by the pressure of fire hoses, dogs turned on them; they screamed, eyes wide with terror. Jack watched the clips privately, not talking to anyone, just making himself watch them over and over, his fist near his chin, staring at the screen.
“Nudge him,” Bobby told me. And on one of those drives to a Civil War cemetery, I do.
“The issues in the South won’t be solved tomorrow,” Jack says.
“That doesn’t mean we can’t start taking steps.”
“It has to be strategic.”
“Right and strategic aren’t exclusive.”
I meet his eyes, then look back to the moving shoulder of the road.
* * *
—
He arranges a meeting between Bobby and James Baldwin, along with other Black writers and artists.
“How did it go?” I ask Bobby afterward.
“It didn’t end well at all,” he says. “I couldn’t connect.”
“You couldn’t?”
“Come on, Jackie. You know I’m on your side on this.”
“So what happened?”
“They walked out. The woman, Lorraine Hansberry, said to me, ‘You and your brother are the best a white America can offer, and if you don’t understand, we’re without hope.’ She’s the one who walked out first. A woman.”
“Does that surprise you?” I say. “A woman has less to start with, so she has less to lose.”
I feel Bobby shift away. I’ve sensed it before, almost a current of guilt that will sometimes cross his face, and I remember that morning, years ago, when I lost the baby and woke up in a daze to those pale hospital walls, the ceiling falling toward me, and he was the one who was there.
* * *
—
It’s Bobby who pushes Jack to speak on national TV about civil rights on June 11, the day students show up to register at the University of Alabama. Many on Jack’s team are against it, worried about the Southern vote. Even Sorensen warns him not to weigh in unless there’s a crisis.
“The governor blocking the door of that school is a crisis,” Bobby says.
An hour before airtime, they’re scrambling to nail down the points of Jack’s Report to the American People on Civil Rights. The speech is unfinished when he sits down for the cameras, but once he’s on air, I can tell the words are alive for him. And watching him, I can feel that his conviction—his sense of a moral imperative—has changed.
The next day when he comes home for lunch, he tells me a Mississippi man, Medgar Evers, was shot in the back in front of his children outside his own house. He got up, staggered thirty feet to his doorstep, gripping his car keys, then collapsed. He was brought by ambulance to an all-white hospital. They refused to treat him.
“So he might have lived,” I say. I feel sick.
“The bullet went through his heart, Jackie. He wouldn’t have lived.”
We’re alone at lunch, the children playing outside.
“How long did it take him to die, Jack?”
“He’ll receive full military honors.”
“They’re cowards.” He looks at me; I say it again. “Cowards.”
* * *
—
Just before he leaves on a two-week trip to Germany and Ireland, he sends legislation to Congress against discrimination, empowering the justice department to order desegregation. He asks Congress to stay in session until a civil-rights bill is enacted. That afternoon, Bobby comes to the Residence to tell Jack a group of civil-rights leaders has asked to meet, to discuss a march on Washington they’ve planned for August.
“They’ve been planning a march since FDR,” Jack says.
“This is different.”
“Try to talk them out of it?”
“Already tried.”
“There can’t be violence, Bobby.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“What we’re talking about is a problem that involves 180 million people.”
“You’re going to come out and say that?”
Jack glances at me; I am sitting at one end of the sofa, listening.
“If that’s where we’re headed,” he says, “yes.”
“Bring Johnson in,” I say. “On this one issue you should. When he spoke in the South, he insisted he wanted Blacks on the platform with him and refused to come if they weren’t.”
“Who told you that?”
“His wife.”
“I don’t want Johnson in the Rose Garden with me,” says Bobby, “when I meet with King and the others.”
He can be so scrappy. Fists swinging. He and Lyndon don’t get along, but they come down on the same side of civil rights. I’ve heard that Johnson complains Bobby’s just using a pop gun when he could pull out the cannon.
“Use Lyndon with the Southern whites,” I say. “He’ll make it a Christian issue, a moral issue. They respect that kind of courage.”
I use that last word intentionally. Bobby won’t notice, but it will register with Jack. Cowards and courage. I know that.
* * *
—
While Jack is in Europe, the children and I will go to Hyannis Port. He’ll meet us there in July. The night before I leave Washington, Bob McNamara and I watch a replay of Jack’s speech in Berlin, where he talks about the Wall and the perils of division. I rewind that moment when he cries to the crowd, “Ich bin ein Berliner!”—I am a Berliner!—so we can watch it again.
“He worked hard to become a strong speaker,” I say. “He wasn’t always, you know.”
I draw another tape off the shelf and hand it to Bob. “This is a speech he gave in the fifties, when he was still quite terrible at it. Watch it sometime; you’ll see the change for yourself.”
It’s curious what happens then. McNamara seems almost reluctant to take the tape. Finally, he does. So interesting, though. Jack’s men. They don’t want to see his flaws, his weakness, or his humanness. They want to imagine he’s just sprung into their midst—godlike, fully formed.
* * *
…
That summer, we’ve rented a different house, a short distance away from the family compound, isolated, at the end of Squaw Island. I swim in the mornings with the children and spend afternoons in the sunroom on the second floor, reading Grimal’s The Civilization of Rome and writing memos to send down to the East Wing staff. I order a dress for the baby’s christening in October. I create a scrapbook for Jack. It’s our tenth anniversary this fall. I fall asleep to the lash of the surf against the rocks while the moon rips the surface of the sea. Sometimes it feels like a dream, those nights alone in the house with the children, moody and ethereal, like it’s only the three of us, the sea, and the sky.
* * *
—
On July 28, I turn thirty-four. Our friend David Ormsby-Gore gives me a book called The Fox in the Attic, about Hitler in Munich and the rise of fascism. Averell Harriman arrives with a jar of caviar so large it has to be wheeled in. A birthday gift from Khrushchev. The contrast makes me laugh.
“He’s trying to say he might play by the rules,” I tell Jack when he arrives that weekend. “Perhaps he’ll agree to sign your test-ban treaty.”
Jack shakes his head. “Khrushchev’s sense of rules is too fungible to be considered rules, but it’s a limited treaty, so he’ll sign it.”
* * *
—
I take John to Caroline’s riding lesson one morning in early August. Jack’s in Washington for the week. I’m standing by the fence at the ring, holding John’s hand, when I feel the world swim, a wave of weakness. I grip the fence and turn to the agent near me, but it isn’t Clint—where’s Clint? Is it his day off? Mr. Landis. Is that who it is? My head so light, the air blurs.
“Mr. Landis, I’m not feeling well. I need to go back to the house.”
The pain shoots through my body as we drive on the bumpy dirt road. Faster, please, Mr. Landis. I’ve begun to sweat. My skin hot and cold at the same time, the fear rising, I can’t breathe, my throat tight. I think I’m going to have that baby. Please, Mr. Landis. The hospital.
They fly me by helicopter to the hospital at Otis Air Force Base. Dr. Walsh is with me. Clint drives up as we land.
“It’s your day off,” I say.
“It’s going to be okay, Mrs. Kennedy.” He stays with me, walking alongside as they rush me into the wing they’ve prepared.
“You’ve told the president, Mr. Hill?”
“He’s already left Washington. He’s on his way.”
“Thank you,” I say, because I need to say something. I need him to read my mind and reassure me again, even with that fear in his eyes, that everything will be okay.
* * *
—
Jack is there when I wake up. The room very sharp and white. His face.
“Where’s the baby?” I say.
“There’s a problem with his lungs.”
“Like John?”
“Not exactly. They’re going to take the baby to Children’s Hospital in Boston.”
“You’ll go with him?”
“Yes.” He is looking at me. I can’t quite bear the way he is looking at me. “He’s beautiful, Jackie.”
“I want to hold him.”
“You can’t yet. They’re helping him breathe.”
“John’s lungs were undeveloped, and he’s fine now. Baby Patrick will be fine.”
Jack nods but doesn’t answer, and I feel the ground underneath me sink away, like the world has lost its edge.
“What is it, Jack? Tell me.”
“Patrick has something called hyaline membrane disease. A film around the air sacs in his lungs.”
“And what will they do?”
“We have to wait and hope his own body dissolves the film.”
“I want to see him, Jack, our baby, before they take him away. Can I see him? Jack, please.”
They wheel him into my room. He is so small and so still. He lies on his back in an Isolette, a little clear box Jack tells me is a pressurized incubator. He has a name band around his tiny wrist. His eyes are closed. He has light-brown hair.
Jack flies with him to Boston. It’s Dr. Walsh who tells me the baby is gone. He passed away at four in the morning. They removed him from the oxygen chamber and the web of tubes. They laid him in Jack’s arms. He was thirty-nine hours, twelve minutes old.
Clint is in the room when Dr. Walsh comes in to tell me these things. Clint’s eyes meet mine, and I feel the grief rip through me.
By the time Jack arrives an hour later, I’ve tried to pull myself together. But he cries telling me what happened, and I cry again with him.
* * *
—
He comes to see me twice a day, often with Caroline, who brings flowers in small lopsided bouquets. Summer flowers—the kind I love—larkspur, trumpet flowers, black-eyed Susans. My daughter’s face is solemn as she holds them out to me, her hair neatly parted, held in place with a barrette. It feels almost too neat, too careful. I don’t want this for her.
The following Saturday, Cardinal Cushing holds a Mass in Boston. I’m still not strong enough to go. It’s Lee who tells me afterward that Jack put his arm around the small white casket, sobbing, like he would not be pulled away from it, like he just couldn’t let it go underground.
