The Second Marriage, page 13
A decade earlier, when she still yearned for her mother’s love, this would have devastated Maria; now that her heart was hardened, it meant nothing. She didn’t recognize herself in her mother’s words; she knew that was not the child she had been.
After Maria had finished reading, she asked Ari to read it too. “Tell me honestly what you think,” she said. “I trust your judgment.”
He started laughing before he reached the second page. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know she’s your flesh and blood, but any normal reader is going to think she is insane. You clearly made the right decision in cutting her out of your life.”
“Are you sure?” Maria had thought the same. The pages were dripping with malice, and full of factual errors too. She would not dignify it with a response, and she would not let it spoil her otherwise idyllic pregnancy. Her mother was her own worst enemy, but she was nothing to Maria now. And she would make sure that, no matter what happened, Evangelia would never meet her grandchild.
Chapter 23
Hyannis Port
Summer 1960
Jackie was coming up on twenty weeks pregnant and did not want to risk traveling cross-country for the Democratic convention in Los Angeles, but she stayed up till two in the morning to watch on television as Jack accepted the presidential nomination. She almost missed it, because the set took ten minutes to warm up; then she had to tinker with the antenna to get rid of fuzzy zigzag lines slashing the picture. Two-year-old Caroline awoke and came downstairs to snuggle sleepily on her lap.
Behind Jack on the stage were the four candidates he had defeated, all of them seasoned politicians. She wondered how they felt about being beaten by a comparative newcomer. Adlai Stevenson would be particularly peeved; he had tried to persuade Jack to run for vice president on his ticket and had now been outrun by him. They looked sincere in their congratulations, but politics was a game for competitive men and no one liked to lose.
Caroline quickly lost interest; to her the distant figure on the TV screen was not her daddy. Jackie felt curiously detached as well, as if he were someone else entirely.
“The New Frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises—it is a set of challenges …” Jack announced.
It was grandiose sounding but there was nothing of substance. The policies could wait. For now, it was about making an impression.
Jackie had asked Joan, Teddy’s ultraglamorous blond wife, to chaperone Jack on the West Coast. She would be the woman on his arm at formal dinners, the one sitting behind him during the interminable speeches. Jackie had urged her to stay close, hoping the presence of his sister-in-law would curtail Jack’s extramarital activities. He had to be careful not to get caught now he was in such a high-profile position.
Jackie was spending the summer at Hyannis Port, reading, painting, and playing with little Caroline. The baby in her womb was much more active than her previous three; she could feel it kicking and rolling around from about eighteen weeks, getting livelier in the evenings, as if having a private party. She was glad for the reassurance that it was alive and thriving; when she realized Arabella had stopped moving inside her, it had been the worst moment of her life.
Jackie’s peace was disrupted on the day of the nomination announcement by the press arriving en masse. Low-flying planes buzzed overhead with photographers leaning out to snap pictures, and she had to give several interviews and stand in the sweltering heat, posing for photographs, just when she was feeling her least attractive. No designers made chic clothing for pregnant women. She had some flared cotton sundresses in floral prints that she wore with white, low-heeled pumps, but they were far from the elegant, streamlined look she normally favored. Then her father-in-law insisted on a press conference, held in the living room of Joe and Rose’s home.
“I’m so excited,” she gushed in answer to the questions fired at her. “Jack would be a wonderful president, who could do so much for this country.”
She had hoped the level of interest in her family would die down after an initial frenzy, but, if anything, it increased. Sightseers came to gawk at their house, so she could no longer wander into the yard without being photographed. Some folk leaned over the picket fence and helped themselves to stems of the rambler roses. If she so much as appeared at a window, the cameras came out.
Is this really the life I wanted? she wondered, thinking back to the six years between her coming-out party and her marriage to Jack, years when she could have chosen a different spouse and changed her fortunes entirely. She had achieved her ambition “not to be a housewife,” but was this too much?
WHILE STILL AT school, she had wavered between John Sterling, son of an ambassador, and Bev Corbin, son of an attorney: the former was fiercely intelligent but not sexy enough, and with the latter it had been purely a physical attraction. She had dithered for a while, then decided to hold out for both qualities in one package, and had broken up with both of them before she turned eighteen.
At her coming-out party, she had scrutinized the eligible candidates and decided that none was dynamic enough. Her long summers in France had featured plenty of flirtations and flings, with men who were exciting but not the marrying type. And then there had been John Husted, lovely John, to whom she had been engaged for a few heady months.
John was a handsome stockbroker with a romantic, poetic side. When she met him at a party, she’d just had her hair cut in the fashionable feather style, which gave her a gamine look.
“You look like a startled deer emerging from a wood and seeing its first human being,” he said. Those were his first words to her.
“I don’t know how to take that,” she replied. “Are you offering to protect me in the big, bad world?”
“It would be my pleasure.” He handed her a glass of champagne from the tray of a passing waiter. “Is that a good start?”
He fell in love with her right from the start—head over heels, utterly besotted—and she was swept up in the romance. When he got down on bended knee and asked her to marry him, when they had known each other less than a month, she was bowled over by his impetuosity and said yes straightaway.
Jackie shook her head, remembering her confidence in the face of the shocked reactions of her mother and friends. “When you find the right person, you just know,” she told them, with a twenty-two-year-old’s certainty.
Looking back, she could imagine what life with John would have been like. They would have lived on New York’s Upper West Side, where he had his stockbroker practice, and kept a summer home on Nantucket near his family’s estate. They would have been members of all the exclusive East Coast clubs and have dined out in New York’s top restaurants. There would have been staff, and she would have spent her days shopping and lunching with friends. She knew he wanted children, and she was pretty sure he would have been faithful.
It was meeting John’s mother that had shown her how much of a straitjacket that life might prove to be. The Husted matriarch seemed determined to slot her into a preformed, wife-shaped mold: she would have to look a certain way, run her household like a battleship, entertain John’s clients in fitting style, and produce exactly the right sort of children. His mother had been shocked that Jackie planned to work for the Washington TimesHerald; nice girls didn’t do dirty jobs like journalism.
Jackie knew she could have fought the matriarch and won. John was so much in love he would have let her do as she pleased, but that in itself put her off. She guessed she had wanted more of a challenge—and Jack Kennedy was certainly that.
A few weeks after her engagement to John, she called Jack at his office and asked if she could interview him for her column.
“I was wondering when you would get around to calling, Miss Bouvier,” he said with a grin, as his secretary showed her in. “But you didn’t need to make work an excuse.”
“Actually, work is the only reason,” she said, holding out her hand to show him her ring. “I’ve gotten engaged since we last saw each other.”
“Who’s the lucky fella?” he asked, and when she told him, he groaned: “Not a stockbroker! Anything but that. He’d be all wrong for you. Let’s go for a cocktail and I’ll explain to you exactly the type of man you need to marry.”
Jackie went for the cocktail but maintained that she was marrying John Husted and that was the end of it. Jack waged an intense campaign to change her mind, and it wasn’t long before he captured her heart. With John, she’d been like an Edith Wharton heroine, consumed by romance; now she realized that true love was bigger and sexier and far more dangerous. It was only a matter of weeks before she had returned her engagement ring to John and started dating Jack instead.
Jack Kennedy seldom brought her flowers or surprise gifts—and, if he did, she knew he was feeling guilty and had gotten his secretary to pick them out. He didn’t shower her with compliments or ask how her day had been. He didn’t often discuss his work with her, because he knew she wasn’t interested in the nitty-gritty of politics. But he asked her advice on the people around him, and she found that flattering.
Jackie had been a people watcher as far back as she could remember. She came across as reserved because she didn’t dominate conversation in a group but sat back and formed her own opinions, and she considered herself a good judge of character. When Jack brought a TV news reporter to dinner, a man named Bob Merryman, the liquor flowed and the jokes got lewd. Jackie watched Bob and saw a shrewdness in his eyes; he was pretending to be drunker than he really was and attempting to lull Jack into indiscretions.
“Don’t trust him,” she whispered behind her hand.
She was proved right the following day when Bob said, on air, that Jack Kennedy told “the bluest jokes” he had ever heard. That wasn’t the kind of image they wanted to cultivate. From then on, Jackie kept a keen eye on the circle Jack surrounded himself with.
She couldn’t imagine him winning the 1960 election. It would mean such an upheaval: a move to the White House, life in the public eye, severe curtailment of her personal freedom. Was she up to the role of First Lady? What if she let him down? Sometimes she secretly hoped he wouldn’t win—but of course she would never breathe a word of that.
He arrived in Hyannis Port on the Sunday after receiving the Democratic nomination, trailed by photographers and eager journalists with pens and notebooks poised.
“Where’s my favorite girl in the whole wide world?” he cried, swinging little Caroline high in the air but looking directly at Jackie. She loved those moments when they searched each other’s eyes and found understanding there. He looked tired, and she knew from his posture that his back was hurting.
“Mrs. Shaw,” she asked the nanny, “can you take Caroline down to the beach?” Caroline protested, but Jackie insisted: “There will be time to play with Daddy later. It’s grown-up time now.”
She took Jack’s arm and tugged on it. “Let’s go indoors.”
She led him to the living room and unfastened his tie, then knelt to untie his shoelaces.
“Thank God for home,” he sighed, lowering himself into an armchair. “I feel saner already. Any chance of a beer?”
She had already asked the maid to leave a chilled Budweiser on a side table, and she flipped the top and poured it into a glass, careful not to make too much foam. She liked knowing what he needed and doing it for him. It was a simple thing. The world would never see her behind-the-scenes supporting role, but she knew she was performing it to perfection.
Chapter 24
Milan
June 1960
Maria decorated a nursery at her home in Milan, choosing pale lemon for the walls, hedging her bets, although she was positive the baby was a girl. She bought heaps of toys: a wooden rocking horse with a thick wool mane and leather saddle; a Steiff teddy bear; a music box that played Swan Lake and had a revolving silver-skirted ballerina. She hired a nurse, who would come and live in the house straight after the birth and accompany them to the Christina later.
She and Ari discussed names, and he accepted her hunch that it was a girl.
“I would like a name from opera,” she said. “Perhaps Elvira or Isolde.”
“Didn’t they all commit suicide or have their hearts broken?” Ari asked. “Why not a classic Greek name, like Polyxeni or Vassiliki?”
“Vassiliki!” She laughed. “Do you want her to sound like a grandmother?”
“Okay,” he conceded. “Perhaps you should choose the name if it is a girl and I will choose for a boy. Do we have a deal?”
Maria was so sure it was a girl that she agreed.
Ari showed her how he shook hands on a business deal, squeezing firmly with his right hand and grasping his associate’s elbow with his left.
He had not yet told his children that they were to have a new sibling; he said he feared it would give Tina ammunition in the ongoing divorce negotiations. Maria squirmed when she imagined Tina’s reaction to their news.
The legal processes were moving at a snail’s pace and it became apparent that they could not be married before the birth, but Maria decided it was only a minor setback. God would forgive them. By wearing her swing coat whenever she left the house, she had succeeded in keeping any hint of her pregnancy out of the press. When the news eventually leaked, as it surely would, she hoped the wedding date would have been set.
As the weeks passed, she marveled at the changes to her body. She had feared she might get fat again, but although her weight rose by twenty pounds, all of it was in her breasts and her belly. The doctor was pleased with her health. The only ill effect she suffered was low blood pressure, which caused occasional dizzy spells, but they passed after a rest and a light snack. She often sang to the baby, hoping to instill a love of music while it was in the womb. Both she and Ari noticed that the little one seemed to stop squirming when it heard her sing, as if it had paused to listen.
On the twenty-sixth of June, the day the baby was to be delivered, Maria traveled to the hospital with Bruna, clutching a bag that contained two of her nightgowns and some newborn-baby clothes, soft and fine as gossamer. Ari would remain at her house until after the Caesarean, then visit mother and child later. He had ordered Montecristo cigars, which he claimed were essential for a proud father—that and some bottles of Maria’s favorite vintage of Dom Pérignon.
Maria was nervous as she was prepped for the operation. She didn’t like the idea of being unconscious, or the knife that would slit open her belly, but it would all be worthwhile later in the day when she could kiss her child for the first time. She closed her eyes and breathed as instructed when the rubber mask was placed over her mouth and nose, aware of a sickly sweet scent as she went under.
WHEN MARIA OPENED her eyes, she was in bed, and Bruna was sitting beside her, fiddling with her rosary beads. She glanced at the window and saw the light outside fading. It must be early evening.
“Where’s the baby?” she asked, her voice husky.
Then she noticed that Bruna looked as if she had been crying, and felt a glimmer of fear.
“There’s a problem,” Bruna said, standing up. “Let me get the doctor.”
Maria pushed herself up on her elbows despite the tearing sensation in her belly. “What kind of problem?” she croaked, but Bruna was halfway out the door.
Was there something wrong with the baby? Why wasn’t it in the room? She lifted the sheet and saw a dressing on her abdomen. The operation had been carried out. She couldn’t feel much when she lay still, so perhaps the anesthetic was still numbing her.
Minutes later Ari came into the room, followed by the doctor, and she knew it was bad news when they couldn’t meet her eyes.
“Where is my baby?” she demanded. Ari came to sit beside her and took her hand, but still he wouldn’t look at her.
The doctor spoke slowly, as if reluctant to tell her. “The child—a boy—was delivered at four-thirty this afternoon.”
“A boy!” She registered this with surprise.
“But I’m afraid he failed to breathe. It seems the lungs were not developed. We tried to assist him but all our efforts failed and he died twenty minutes later.”
“What?” She turned to Ari and he nodded, gripping her hand so tightly she thought he would crush the bones.
Maria turned to the doctor again. “My child was alive this morning. I could feel him moving. How can he be dead now?”
“It seems there was a disorder affecting the lungs. We’re not sure what.”
She couldn’t take it in. How could her child have underdeveloped lungs, when hers were so powerful? She would have given the baby one of her own, were such a thing possible.
“Was it my fault?” she asked. She needed to know. “Was it because of my malformed uterus?”
The doctor shook his head. “Not at all. There’s nothing anyone could have done differently. It’s just nature’s way sometimes.”
She looked at Ari again. He was fighting back tears. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “I’ve let you down.”
He made a strangled noise in his throat and shook his head.
There was a ringing sound in Maria’s ears, and for a moment she thought this might be a nightmare. Maybe she was still under anesthesia and would awaken to find the baby was fine. Or maybe they had made a mistake, and when they checked again they would find he was breathing.
“Can I see him?” she asked.
They didn’t like that idea. The doctor frowned. “We don’t encourage it. You might find his appearance upsetting.”
“Of course I must see him. I insist!” She knew she would never believe this without seeing him with her own eyes. It was so sudden, so surreal.
