Jackie, page 35
“I want people to understand there was a man behind it all,” I say.
“Why don’t you write a tribute we can include?”
“I can’t even write a letter to a friend.”
“It doesn’t have to be long. And it will be your words. You’ll have complete control.”
* * *
—
After they’re gone, I walk inside with Bobby. The children still play on the lawn. It’s almost dusk.
“Will you hurl yourself into Tennyson with me?” I ask.
“Sure.”
“Or Shakespeare?”
“Whatever you want, Jackie.”
I look at him and he doesn’t look away. It happens then, something stopped in the air between us, and through the awkwardness and the silence, I can hear the waves, the laughter of the children, still with that raw and terrible magic.
I pull out a book, find a page, and hand it to him. He reads. The lamplight plays its tricks, and his face looking down at the page is lovely and hungry and doomed. He glances up.
“What?” he says.
“I was thinking about a letter your father wrote to me once about Jack. How he was a child of fate. If he fell into a puddle of mud in a white suit, he’d come up ready for a Newport Ball.”
His eyes close to me then.
“Yes,” he says. “That’s one of those things my father would say.”
* * *
—
It isn’t about Bobby, is it? It never was. It’s about some other deeper thing inside me he ignites. Some deep, lost burning that reminds me of you.
* * *
—
That night, I sit at my desk. A stack of books, a pad of paper, a pen.
I start from memory. Incomplete passages, fragments. Not my words but the words of authors Jack loved. The writing calms me. I copy lines from Tennyson, lines from Richard III, lines from Buchan’s Pilgrim’s Way.
I spend hours writing it out. Then I go back and make cuts and margin notes, my own words this time, which I weave into the rest. I tear up most of what I’ve done and start again. Each time I rewrite it, I know it’s not what I want and it isn’t enough, but it’s more than I had before.
I put the pen away.
* * *
—
In the dark you come to me. You cross the room from the window. You’ve just come in from sailing. Your clothes damp, hair raked with salt. But you are there, reaching toward me through the moon.
* * *
—
There was an evening once, years ago, when we were walking back to our house from dinner at your parents’. Caroline was with us. She danced on ahead, her white dress flitting. “Like an angel,” you said, then you stopped walking for a moment, your head tilted back, and the dark poured over your throat, your skin so pale, looking up toward the stars, those bits of radiance we barely noticed that fell like tiny bright knives through levels of distance and time.
* * *
—
How does it happen?
I want to ask you this.
How can I wonder something like this with anyone other than you?
* * *
…
I spend September with my mother and the children in Newport.
On September 12, I come downstairs early. The light is ragged, the morning overcast and cool. Alone in the dining room, I skim the headlines. Hurricane Dora, school bussing, Vietnam. In two days, the children and I will move to New York. The apartment I bought at 1040 Fifth Avenue is nearly finished. I’ve chosen what furniture to keep. The Louis XVI bureau where Jack signed the test-ban treaty; my collection of miniature paintings from India; my father’s Empire desk. I find it easier to inverse edit, choose what I want and let go of the rest. Caroline will start school, and the new agent assigned to John will bring him to the zoo and the park. He reminds me of Agent Foster. I’ll have to tell him not to spoil John, not to throw him up in the air every time he asks.
* * *
—
A year ago today, it was our tenth anniversary. We were here, in Newport, and you set out those gifts, including the snake bracelet, and asked me to choose.
* * *
—
The memory cuts.
* * *
—
Later that afternoon, when the children and I are driving home from the beach, I take the longer route. The speed is a visceral comfort, the road pulling under the car as the wheel twists lightly in my hands. Behind me on the long vinyl backseat, they are asleep, a sprawl of legs and arms, sweet lips sticky from ice cream, Caroline’s fair head, John’s dark one. I tilt the mirror to catch them in the rearview, and a sudden warmth floods my body. There’s a dirt turnoff up ahead. I pull in and park on a lip of packed gravel that washes out with every storm, the car idling, windows unrolled halfway, the scent of beach rose, sweet pepperbush, the salt smell off the marsh. I can hear the light sound of the children’s breathing. I don’t want it to end. I cut off the engine. There is nothing else I need to do, nowhere else I need to be. Only with them. Only here.
* * *
…
Onassis writes to me. I wait a few days before I answer.
Dear Ari,
I received your note, and yes, I would enjoy dinner sometime. Let me know when you’ll be here, and we will see….
* * *
—
Lee told me months ago that things between them had cooled, then ended. It was short-lived, their affair, as my sister’s flings often are. The children and I have moved to Manhattan—it has felt uncanny, being here, in this city, like time has folded back on itself. The week we arrived, I took them rowing in Central Park. As we walked toward the boathouse, it struck me how alive the city is. No one noticed us, or if they did, they paused only for a moment, then moved on. The children were happy, and it felt like just a week ago I was their age. Lee and I used to go for walks in Central Park with our nurse. One day I wandered off. I was careful to let it appear unintentional; I didn’t want the nurse to notice I was gone. I looked back once, walking backward until she and Lee fell out of sight. A curious sensation, I remember how I loved it even then—that sheer sudden thrill of being unseen, unaccounted for.
I am going to the new Broadway show about the Jewish immigrants, which just opened, Fiddler on the Roof.
* * *
—
One day in October, I stop with the children at the news shop on the corner for two chocolate milks, and it’s there: Time magazine, with a photograph of Oswald. A banner of text: The Warren Commission: No Conspiracy, Domestic or Foreign.
John is tugging at my hand. “Mummy.” I look up, over him, to the wall lined with chips and cans. My eyes drop. Caroline is watching me. She picks up a travel magazine and places it squarely on the rack to cover Oswald’s face. Then she takes the lollipop from John’s hand, puts it on the counter, and says to the cashier in her grown-up voice, “We will take this, please. How much will it be?”
The spell snaps. I fish through my coat pocket for a quarter. I hand it to Caroline, who pays the man and doesn’t wait for change, and the three of us walk outside. Bells on the shop door ring as it shuts behind us.
* * *
—
I remember what I said to Bobby that last day of the interviews—the day the writer Manchester left.
“I need to get out.” That’s what I said.
I’ll never get out. I realize that now.
* * *
…
One day bleeds into the next.
rise after not sleeping
smoke
coffee
wonder if the newspaper is safe to open
wake the children
* * *
—
Bobby comes when I ask him to. He’ll leave early from the office or come after dinner. He’ll say good night to the children and sit with me.
“Tell me this will end, Bobby. If not this year, then someday. I’ve always loved the ritual of reading the paper with my coffee in the morning. Now I can’t even do that.”
“It’s only temporary,” he says. “Until the anniversary. The day after, they’ll start talking about other things.”
* * *
—
In a photograph of Oswald, he is holding a gun in the backyard of a house. A notch in the stock.
The ballistics matched, supposedly. Bullet fragments found in the car matched bullets from that gun. Bits of fabric caught in the rifle were the same colors as the shirt he was wearing when he was apprehended.
How did we not grasp ahead of time the shape of what would come? That you would be killed. That it would be violent. There was too much rage in the world for it to be otherwise.
How did we not understand it was inevitable—the way love or war is inevitable, the way art and truth eventually rise? How could we not have seen it? Maybe you did. Maybe that’s why you’d make those chilling morbid jokes. Maybe you understood that if not Oswald (if it even was Oswald), someone would have done it.
There were too many who hated what you stood for. Too many who didn’t want the seismic change you brought, that toppling of an order, a way of life with its implicit injustice that served some and destroyed others.
You were too easy to scapegoat. You were incandescent. That was the word.
You were the walking, breathing incarnation of the youth that would ultimately upend them.
You were adored and, because of that, you were dangerous.
Bold, brilliant, extraordinary. You burned, it was just so bright—that future you were after. The America we saw.
* * *
—
A small knock on the door. Caroline.
“You’re crying, Mommy.”
“I’m not. Just waking up.”
“You’re crying about Daddy, aren’t you?”
“I’m just waking up.”
“It’s okay,” Caroline says solemnly. “I’ll take care of you. It’s time for you to come.”
“I love you, sweetheart. I’m coming.”
I meet with Dorothy Schiff from the New York Post because Bobby has asked me to. He wants her endorsement.
“Bobby’s not what people think,” I tell her. “They call him ruthless. But he’s the opposite. He’s been so good to my children and me. He is kind, and the thing about Bobby is that he can’t not tell the truth. So he might seem ruthless. Because the truth is exactly that.”
* * *
—
When the phone rings that afternoon, and it’s Bobby, I assume he wants to know about the meeting with Dorothy. A bright day. The leaves on the turn, the light with that longer slant in it I love. Miss Shaw has taken John out, and Caroline will be home from school in an hour. But Bobby is not calling to ask about the meeting with Dorothy. He is calling because he wants me to know what’s happened. It will be in the papers tomorrow, and he wants me to hear it from him.
“Just tell me,” I say.
“Mary Meyer was shot and killed walking the towpath beside the canal.”
The walls peel; the ceiling is an eggshell.
“They have the man who did it. They’re sure.”
“If they’re saying they’re sure, they must not be.”
“Jackie—”
“I’m glad you let me know.”
Hanging up, I remember, of all things, the dress. The bedraggled mess of layered chiffon Mary wore that night she went out in the snow and came back soaking wet.
Mary used to love to walk the towpath in the middle of the day. She’d work on a painting in the morning, then go down to the canal before lunch. Remembering this, I don’t see Mary in an oversize shirt streaked with paint, walking along the canal. I see her in that dress, a little tipsy, her face smeared with mascara and tears, that woman who wouldn’t stay on the course the world had laid out.
* * *
—
A week later, more details are released. We learn that the murderer was a Black man. He claimed he was fishing when the police came after him for something he didn’t even know had taken place.
“He didn’t do it,” I say to Bobby the next time he stops by.
“He shot her twice.”
“Someone shot her twice.”
“Jackie, don’t. There’s nothing behind this. They found him wandering in the woods, the fly of his pants unzipped.”
“He claimed the police did that to him.”
“He shot her twice,” he says again, as if that somehow proves it.
“Don’t be a fool, Bobby, or imagine I am. Mary knew too much, and they killed her for it.”
He stares at me, and for a moment I regret being so direct. But I’m right and he knows it. That man didn’t kill Mary, but Mary is dead, and somehow we all played a part in that.
It will get brushed under the rug. There’s too much at stake right now. The election is coming. Martin Luther King, Jr., just won the Nobel Peace Prize. Rumors are bubbling up that Khrushchev will be deposed. Mary and the Black man will be lost to all that. The man will sit in prison, go to trial. More than likely he’ll be convicted, and the layers of what really happened will just drift away.
* * *
…
On November 3, Bobby is elected to the Senate and Lyndon Johnson wins the presidency.
* * *
—
The Look magazine commemorating Jack is coming out on November 17. They send over proofs with photographs and the words I wrote. Those passages from literature Jack loved that I compiled. It is beautiful, and it is heartbreaking.
I spend November 22 with John and Caroline. I’ve canceled the Times subscription until November 24. I don’t read the tributes in the newspapers or magazines. There are requiem Masses I don’t attend. Television documentaries I don’t watch.
I eat a quiet dinner with the children. I put them to bed. I stay up late and write letters.
* * *
—
A flash as that piece of your head shot away, and I saw it flood out—vision, brilliant spirit, light.
* * *
—
Then the day is over. It is midnight. The next day. And I have gotten through it.
* * *
—
On November 25, John turns four. He wakes up early and hurls himself into my arms, asking when are the presents, when is the cake, when is the party. Breakfast first, I tell him. We walk into the dining room together. I sit down with my coffee and unfold the newspaper. On the front page are excerpts of my testimony to the Warren Commission—my “what ifs” and “if onlys.”
1965
The sun rises, then sets. The last of the leaves fall. The trees are bare, waiting for snow. Smoke from a chimney, fires snap, lights turned down at bedtime, then snuffed out. The windows darken and the sky is bright with stars—their disordered burning without design, stars flung around like dice.
* * *
—
Christmas in Aspen. Skiing with Bobby and the children in Vermont. In February, I go to Puerto Marques, then rent a house in Hobe Sound. I read the papers. The assassination of Malcolm X; the attacks on King and flights of protesters marching from Selma to Montgomery. They are met by police, tear gas, and nightsticks; they’re beaten at the bridge.
“This isn’t someone else’s country,” I tell Bobby.
* * *
—
In New York that spring, I go out with a string of escorts—intellectual, witty, gentlemanly gentlemen. I sleep with one or two of them once or twice. Even if it were more than that, it would mean nothing. These men are friends. I talk and laugh with them. I trust them. Only one feels more serious—the architect Jack Warnecke. Bobby warns me it’s too soon.
“Too soon?”
He doesn’t answer.
“Are you jealous?” I say, teasing. “You, with your nine children, and your lovely live-wire wife, with her cheery faith in you and God and all things Kennedy. Bobby, you couldn’t be jealous.”
He’s been moody recently, brooding over Johnson, who’s taken the high road on civil rights that Bobby had staked for his own. On national TV, Johnson pledged support to King and the marchers at Selma. He called for the passage of a new voting-rights bill. All things Bobby would have done.
“It’s good Lyndon’s taking a stand,” I tell him. “What matters is that the bills get passed.”
He doesn’t answer.
Dropping ice into a glass, I say, “Ethel doesn’t need people going around saying you’ve been seen leaving my apartment in the early morning.”
“Ethel’s fine.”
But it comes out hard. The fine.
* * *
—
David Ormsby-Gore calls from England to ask if I’ll attend a memorial ceremony in May. The queen wants to dedicate a tract of land at Runnymede in Jack’s name. I tell David I’ll think about it, but only because he’s the one asking.
“Harold Macmillan could speak in my stead,” I say.
“I don’t know,” David says. A pause. I remember then: the Profumo affair. Macmillan’s secretary of state, John Profumo, lied about a scandal and was caught in the lie, and though Macmillan had done nothing wrong, the incident drove him to resign. There was a young model involved and a Soviet attaché.
