Jackie, page 28
“You don’t want that, though.”
“No one comes out to see the president through a layer of glass.”
* * *
—
I read over the speech I’m giving tonight in Spanish. Jack’s talking now with Kenny O’Donnell about the feud in Texas, about Connally and Yarborough, splintering the Democrats.
“Texas will be hard enough to win without that,” Kenny says.
Jack changes the subject. “Any furniture broken last night at the party?”
“Just a Bobby and Ethel party,” Dave Powers says.
“Who was more wild?” Jack says. “Ethel or the kids?”
Dave and Kenny laugh.
“And that was only Bobby turning thirty-eight,” Jack says. “Imagine when he hits forty.”
* * *
—
Before we land, I go into the bedroom to change. White skirt, black belt. I clip my hair under my hat—not a beret, but enough to keep things from being destroyed in a car with no bubbletop.
I finish pinning the hat. The light is blinking. We’ve begun our descent.
* * *
—
The crowd is a dark sea beneath as we touch down in San Antonio. Jack leans back, shifting in his seat. He turns, looks at me, and grins.
“All right,” he says. “Let’s do this thing.”
* * *
—
The route is lined with people, hands waving, banners, flags.
“Jack, look,” I say, pointing to a massive cardboard sign.
Jackie
Come Water-Ski
in
Texas
Dave Powers glances at me, then at Jack. “They’re here for her,” he says.
* * *
—
That night at the Rice Hotel as we’re finishing dinner in our suite, the Johnsons come in. Lady Bird wants to know what she can arrange for our visit to their ranch.
“I’m sure Jackie will want to ride,” she says. “But what about you, Mr. President?”
“I’ll ride with Jackie,” he says, as if riding horses with me is the most natural thing in the world. He asks an aide to have the White House ship his riding pants to the Austin Air Force Base.
“My trousers, Lady Bird, will meet us at your house.”
* * *
—
“I like them,” I say as the door closes behind the Johnsons.
Jack laughs. “You used to call them Colonel Cornpone and his little Porkchop.”
“They’re kind,” I say.
“Do you think she’ll ever call me Jack?”
“On the last day of your presidency. Or maybe the day after.”
* * *
—
We’re alone, and he tells me then about the oxygen chamber he saw earlier that day at the aerospace center. He’s sitting at a small desk, digging a pen into a doodle on the hotel stationery.
“I pulled one of the scientists aside,” he says, “to ask if space medicine would have saved Patrick.”
Every time he says Patrick’s name, I feel a shift in him, like the name is a key that unlocks a door that swings open into a pool of dark. He keeps on with the doodle, silent.
“It’s time to get ready, Jack.”
“I know.”
I cross the room and kiss his cheek. I see it then, the sketch on the hotel stationery. A sailboat.
“I love that, Jack. Look how fast it’s going. But no one is in it. Who has the tiller?”
“He’s behind the sail.”
“Why’s that kite up in the corner?”
“That’s the sun.”
“Shaped like a diamond. Reluctant abstractionist, you. Are you sure it’s not a kite?”
He laughs and puts the pen down. “Where’s my tie?”
Jack
Later, he’ll wish he’d grabbed that little drawing on the way out of the room. Folded it into his pocket to give to her on the plane home.
But he forgets all about it. She is late, and he forgets almost everything but the fact that she’s late. He knocks on the door of the room where she’s getting dressed. No answer. He knocks again, more sharply.
“Be right out,” she calls.
He paces the hall.
* * *
—
When the door opens five minutes later, he looks up and she is there, black velvet dress, long sleeves, her neck roped with pearls. The hotel staff is in a neat line as they walk down the narrow hall together. He greets them as they pass: “Hello.” “Good evening.” Back in their suite, someone else is packing their belongings, bringing the bags downstairs and loading them into the car for the drive to the Houston Coliseum, the dinner there, then on to the airport.
They cross the mezzanine floor of the Rice Hotel and walk into the ballroom, where Spanish workers from the League of United Latin American Citizens are gathered.
He steps up to the podium and says a few words about the Alliance for Progress. Then he introduces her and steps away, leaving her alone on the stage. She hesitates for a moment, then begins to speak in Spanish, the words slow, the smile almost shy. They quiet for her. He catches a word here, a word there. He can feel her voice resonate, that pale of her face and her long dark shape, and the feeling of her is like water in the rage of the lights shining down, that almost otherworldly calm about her, grace.
* * *
—
Afterward, on the forty-five-minute flight to Fort Worth, he tells her what he overhead Lyndon Johnson say to his aide Valenti. “People just love that gal.”
This makes her laugh.
He does not tell her that when Lyndon said that, Valenti almost didn’t hear him at first, because he was staring at Jack’s right hand and the involuntary shake of the fingers.
It’s worse, more intense, when he’s tired. He’d shoved his hand into his pocket, and Valenti’s head snapped up, embarrassed to have been caught staring.
* * *
—
Thirty minutes into the flight, she’s worked through nearly half a pack of Newport menthols. Eight stubs in the ashtray. One smolders. She notices him watching her. She picks up the one still lit and softly grinds it out.
* * *
…
George wakes him at 7:30 a.m. Gray rain beats against the window.
“Let’s hope it lets up, George,” he says.
* * *
—
The Connally vs. Yarborough conflict is in the headline news.
Storm of Controversy Surrounds Kennedy’s Visit. Widening Democratic Split.
* * *
—
Half an hour later, he walks out of the hotel into the drizzle and crosses the red-bricked street. The crowd thickens. Chants of his name mix in with the rain. A woman runs up to him, aiming something black at his face. A flash goes off, then someone gets hold of her and she is borne away. “Just a camera, sir. Sorry about that.”
* * *
—
The crowd is chanting her name now: “Jack-ie! Jack-ie!”
* * *
—
Her schedule had been on the table; he’d glanced at it before walking out of the room. Next to breakfast in the grand ballroom, her handwriting in red script. JBK won’t attend, she’d written.
“Tell Clint to get her down,” he says now to the agent with him. “I know she didn’t plan on it, but tell Clint to explain I need her down here. Now.”
* * *
—
They’ve set up a makeshift stage on a flatbed truck. He’s offered a raincoat. He shakes his head and steps up, turning to the crowd. They cheer, he raises a hand, and they still.
Play it right. Just get this day right.
* * *
—
Stepping back inside, he glances at his watch, then at the agent.
“Well?”
“Clint says Mrs. Kennedy will be right down.” The agent tries to sound reassuring.
“What else did she say?”
“She asked us to remind you that you told her to make sure she out-belled the belles.”
* * *
—
Walking toward the ballroom, he runs into Yarborough.
“Mr. President,” Yarborough says, all smiles.
“Stick to Johnson like Duco, will you, Ralph,” he says. “For Christ’s sake, just cut it out.”
He strides toward the kitchen, glancing back once to make sure his team is there, behind him, in place. They duck through the kettles and around the counters to keep up. He comes to the double doors that open into the ballroom.
“Everybody set?” he says. “All right, let’s go.”
* * *
—
Twenty minutes into the breakfast, the door to the kitchen opens again.
Clint is with her as she pauses for a moment, copper and stainless steel through the open kitchen door behind her, and in the ballroom two thousand conservatively dressed conservative Texans are rising from their chairs to catch a glimpse. She steps into the room and the chaos of klieg lights. They call her name, clapping their hands. She smiles, her eyes deer-like, bright, finding his, looking nowhere else, only at him. She threads the gauntlet of long tables toward the dais. Clint’s eyes dart, sweeping left, right, always shifting, watchful. Jack has witnessed it, the precise formal dance between them. He has watched them arriving at the White House from Virginia, Clint driving, Jackie stepping out of the passenger seat, her hair windblown, face flushed, the scent of cigarette smoke on her clothes. She trusts Clint completely. She’ll ride down a highway with him, windows open, her feet on the dash, smoking, listening to the radio. Some casual interval of ordinary life.
She has reached the dais. She takes the few steps and passes Jack on her way to her seat. Her hand, for an instant, brushes his. Then she sits down and smiles, the sweet warmth in her face so sudden and uncertain, he feels a sharp ache. He turns back to the crowd.
The cheers roar like fire.
November 22, 1963
We have an hour before the flight to Dallas. Walking back to our suite, I hold his arm.
“I couldn’t decide, Jack, between the long gloves or the short gloves, and then once we came outside, Clint explained I was going to a breakfast in a ballroom.”
“Now we’re back, and we can have breakfast.”
“I want to look at the art,” I say. “Did you see what they did in the room—the art they hung for us? They must have stripped their whole museum. I was too tired to really see it last night, then I woke up to Van Gogh, Picasso, and that sculpture of the girl.”
There’s a catalog of the art on the coffee table. Jack flips through it.
“Does it say who put this together?” I ask.
“A Mrs. J. Lee Johnson III. Why don’t we call her?”
“Did you know they were doing this?”
“I know everything.”
I laugh. “How dim of me not to remember.”
“It was in the papers. Kenny saw it and told me.”
“I don’t trust Texas, Jack. Connally—I hate his big soft mouth.”
“You mustn’t use that word.”
“Mouth?”
“Hate.” He looks at me. “Let’s give Mrs. J. Lee Johnson a call.”
“She’s probably a Republican.”
“I’m sure she’s a Republican.”
“Do we have time?”
“Always.”
“If that was true, you wouldn’t need to rush me to get here and there, would you?”
“The faster you get down to things like ballroom breakfasts, the more time you have with me.” He smiles as he says it. It’s not the kind of thing he’d usually say, and he’s only half serious. That’s how he talks around things he cares about—he floats them out in a teasing way, making a joke, testing the air or the heart.
He picks up the phone and asks the operator to help hunt up this Mrs. Johnson III. I study the Van Gogh on the wall. The paint does not seem dry.
“Well, Mrs. Johnson,” Jack says into the receiver, “Mrs. Kennedy would like to express her thanks to you as well. Let me get her for you.”
He holds out the receiver, and I take it.
* * *
—
“That was nice,” I say, hanging up.
“Come to California with me.”
“Is that the next trip?”
“In two weeks.”
There’s a knock on the door.
“Open,” he shouts. He’s still looking at me, waiting for my answer.
“I guess I’ll go anywhere with you, Jack.”
The papers Kenny O’Donnell brings in include The Dallas Morning News turned to a black-bordered full page and a large headline that reads: Welcome Mr. Kennedy to Dallas.
“It isn’t good,” Kenny says. “This either.” He tosses another paper on the table, with a half-page article about how Jack has failed to recognize the needs of the South.
“I was looking forward to the treason leaflets myself,” Jack says. “Got one of those for me?”
Kenny digs into his jacket pocket and tosses one down. I pick it up. Two photographs of Jack—mug-shot style, one face forward, one at profile. Underneath in large type:
Wanted
For
Treason
I skim the numbered list.
Betraying the Constitution
Turning the sovereignty of the U.S. over to the communist controlled United Nations.
WRONG on innumerable issues affecting the security of the U.S.
Farther down:
He has given support and encouragement to the Communist-inspired racial riots…. Aliens and known Communists abound….
I set down the leaflet.
“How can they even think this, let alone print it?”
“Texas,” Kenny says.
“I don’t like it here, Jack,” I say. “They don’t like you at all.”
“They don’t like change,” Jack says. He taps the leaflet. “Keep one to frame.”
* * *
…
12:20 Main Street, Dallas.
Clint Hill jogs alongside the car. Every few blocks, he hops up on the running board to catch his breath, until Jack throws him a look; then Clint hops off and starts jogging again in the street. The sun strikes off the dark waxed surface of the car. We pass the looming stretch of a department store.
One intersection, then another. A turn.
The crowd swells and ebbs. It’s like any other crowd, a tide of faces, waving hands, bunting, loud cheers in the hot white glare of the sun. Behind them, the expressionless blank windows of factory buildings flank the street.
Another turn.
Up ahead, a tract of green where the space opens—trees, blue free sky.
“You can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you, Mr. President,” Nellie Connally says, twisting around in her seat, a wide smile, bright-pink cheeks.
Jack smiles back at her. “No, you can’t.”
An underpass ahead.
Jack
12:31 p.m. CST
* * *
—
“Take off your glasses, Jackie,” he tells her. He sees her squint—the sun hot, bright.
* * *
—
You can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you, Mr. President….
* * *
—
A boy standing on the curb with his father stares as they pass by, a newsboy cap, scrubbed face; slowly moving, a tentative smile surfaces through the freckles and pale skin, a small hand creeping up, starting to wave.
A motorcycle backfires, scorched air, the light blinding, that sound and its echo, the world contracts. The boy on the curb is gone. He turns to find her, his wife, the turning a reflex to anchor the sound; she is facing away from him, toward the crowd on her side of the car, her hand raised, sunlight bright off the bracelet on her wrist, her gloved hand moving back and forth like a tiny flag. He starts to turn back, his eye skimming hers as she turns in his direction even as he is turning away, his hand raised now, waving at the people cheering from the curb. The air cracks again, the backfire from somewhere behind them. He jerks forward. Arms twitch. Hands lurching up. Someone is shouting. He goes to answer; a sea fills his throat, the pain searing. He turns again to her, his mouth open to ask, and her face is near his face, her eyes dark, wide, the strangest expression, terror, her hands grip his arm, her body lifting, as she tries to force his arms down—the sound again—
* * *
—
Night blooms in his head.
* * *
—
The sound deafening, now only silence. As he watches, the world picks up speed, the sky above them on a tilt, clouds, a hem of buildings, trees, the edge of what might be a park floods by, the rush of the car underneath, and she is there.
* * *
—
Jack.
He reaches for her—
* * *
—
