Tenderness, page 6
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The bed in the Marguery was vast. By night, she floated in it as if on the Dead Sea. The solitude was both effortless and alien.
Jack was somewhere in West Virginia, by way of Boston, and would then hop a flight to Florida. They were trying again, notionally, to conceive, but he was campaigning, and the truth was, she was afraid. She’d been pregnant three times in their six years of marriage. Before Caroline, she’d lost two babies. First, a miscarriage. Then Arabella.
When she’d hemorrhaged in her sleep that summer in ’56, the pain had been primordial, as if she were being pulled inside out. She’d turned dumb and blind with it, clinging to the edge of their bed as if to a capsized keel. Jack was in Europe, and she felt sure that if it hadn’t been for her step-sister’s insistence that night, she would have bled to death.
Later, during the D & C, she had tried to tell the doctors the anesthetic wasn’t getting through to her, but she’d been unable to make herself heard through the mask.
In the aftermath, she had blinked at the world, unable to assemble it. Nor would it ever assemble again, or not as it had been. Its shape would only ever be lumpen and awkward. Yet life, she now felt, was only truly loved if loved amid and for its misshapenness.
At some level, Jack was afraid too, as much as he wanted another child. He would never touch her when she was pregnant. Babies in the womb were sacred and, in her three pregnancies, the sheets of their marital bed had remained crisp and cool.
Not that it was all about her. Far from it. Jack had already had spinal surgery twice since they’d married. The risks, his doctors explained each time, were high. Both she and his father had pointed enthusiastically to the inspiration of F.D.R. – a leader who had led from a wheelchair – but Jack wouldn’t hear of it. Even when the pain was close to crippling, he would hardly tolerate crutches, let alone a wheelchair.
Before his operations, she had never truly prayed. She was suspicious of it even, especially when it was muddied by self-interest. But suddenly she prayed. She prayed like hell. She ceased to be discriminating. She pleaded with Jack’s Creator. Alone in St. Francis’s in Hyannis, she knelt. She bent her forehead low, because to bow one’s head – to humble oneself before life and its mysteries – was, finally, the only utterance one could make, something spoken by the body, in all its wordless human vulnerability.
After the first operation, Jack went down with an infection and slipped into a coma. He was expected to die. But he didn’t – not Jack. He rallied. He was soon sitting up and reading newspapers and spy stories, with a new silver plate in his back. He grinned at her and said it would boost his personal magnetism.
Something did. In between operations, he criss-crossed the country, and people loved him.
He was easy to love.
Safety, she now knew, was an illusion and, as her gambling father had always said, nothing twisted you in the wind like hope. But Jack was determined his campaign was going to run on just that – hope, not fear – or he’d kill himself trying.
In August ’56, when their unborn daughter died, he was on a yachting vacation, off the coast of Elba with assorted friends. Privately, she was never convinced he’d got the first flight back. No one was. His love of children and his fear of childlessness ran deep. He couldn’t face it. Nor could he face his fear that he was to blame. Their family doctor had suggested to him and Joe Sr. that a venereal infection Jack had had at some point might have affected her fertility and her womb. Jack was apparently beside himself when the doctor said that, but Joe wouldn’t hear of it: ‘Nonsense. The girl’s made of porcelain. That’s the problem.’
Ethel, her sister-in-law, told her the truth, about the suspected infection. She said she couldn’t bear to see her so low, thinking she’d let Jack and the Kennedys down – what with a childless man being unlikely to take the White House and all. That sort of worry wasn’t good for her, Ethel said, her face duly glum. Jackie hadn’t thought anything of that sort until Ethel had said so. The grief for Arabella had been enough to bring her low. But it was only Ethel trying to be kind, because it was how Ethel would have felt herself. Bobby and Ethel already had a brood of four, with a fifth on the way. She couldn’t stop getting pregnant, Ethel said, and she puffed out her cheeks, in exaggerated comic exhaustion, as if to say Jackie didn’t know the half of it.
Jackie didn’t, she was sure, but she knew about Arabella.
Eight months old, perfect, and still as a closed, white bud.
She’d chosen a fairy-tale name for a child who could not be held.
When she was discharged from hospital, she found herself unable to return to their new house in Hickory Hill, with its silent, freshly painted nursery. So Jack sold it, at cost, to Bobby, and they themselves took a rented place near Washington, a three-story red-brick row house in Georgetown. Then, with Joe Sr.’s help, Jack bought Irving Avenue, next to the Big House, the Kennedy family home on the Cape, where they had all grown up. Before long, he was planning his 1958 campaign for re-election to the Senate. ‘Already?’ she said. He was hardly at home. When he was, the time was so precious that what else could they do but ‘play house’?
On the Cape, venturing out at the end of that summer, after Arabella, she walked their stretch of beach, and the winds off the Sound blew at the gate of her heart. Clang, clang. The wind was wild company. It gusted in her ears and wouldn’t let her think. It said, there is only this moment, here, now.
The drag of the tide was a sedative. The dunes made ramparts to keep the world out. That warm September, she swam by night in the amniotic dark of the Sound. Mrs. Clyde and her mother-in-law would not have approved, but Ethel and Bobby had produced their fifth child, a girl, and there was much rejoicing. The Kennedys were distracted. It was a mercy. The island of Nantucket blinked at her in the distance.
She had stopped herself from telling Jack that, in her mind, she’d named the baby ‘Arabella’. It had never occurred to him that their daughter should have a name. Her gravestone simply said ‘Daughter’. At Jack’s request, Bobby had made the arrangements for the funeral while his brother traveled back via France.
One couldn’t allow oneself to be overwhelmed by sadness.
And yet she was low, lower than she’d imagined possible. It was amazing how one’s body could perform life to everyone’s satisfaction but one’s own.
At her sister Lee’s insistence, Jackie traveled that fall to London to spend time with Lee and her husband Michael in their elegant new house on Chester Square. London provided the distraction of bright, fashionable parties. But it was among the ruins of the city, in the bleak rubble-scape, that she felt most at ease – because the rubble was inside her as much as it was out.
Little had changed in the city since she’d covered the Coronation for the Herald-Tribune in ’53, her first proper job. Three years on, London was still devastated where bombs and rockets had knocked reality through. She found herself blinking at the wasteground of a lovely crescent or a formerly elegant row of Georgian houses. Saplings grew in once grand foundations. Internal walls reared up unexpectedly, dividing the day, and cellars gaped from the streets, dark as gullets.
The city was soot-stained, shell-pocked, haunted. Triumphal arches and monuments were covered in their strange, coal-black fur. Nothing swam in the Thames. In a bomb-crater off the Strand, a trolleybus had suddenly appeared after two heavy nights of rain and more than a decade under earth and sludge. She’d gone to see it for herself, vaguely thinking it was the route she had often taken during her stay in ’53. When she arrived, a police constable was bearing a mud-caked purse away.
She stood and watched, like some sort of drifter, which, in effect, she was. Or one of those people who turn up at the scene after a disaster or murder to stare. Perhaps it made her feel more grateful for life. Perhaps it made her feel.
Londoners on their way to work wore gray, navy or brown – there was little else in shop windows – and most, she thought, looked under-fed, thin, and pinched tight as clothes pegs. Little wonder her glamorous younger sister turned heads. By the time Jackie arrived, Lee was conducting at least a few extramarital affairs, of one sort or another, with prominent men.
Once, she would have judged her sister sternly. Now, she let herself imagine…Madame Bovary, Madame Récamier, Anna Karenina, Lady Chatterley. What if an affair was not always a form of cheating? What if it might also, sometimes, be about living as honestly as one could in a world which required men to be more than they were, and women to be far less? Was it any less honest than so many marriages, which were, as everyone knew, transactional by nature – a womb for one’s children in return for a respectable home and security?
Three years into their marriage, her womb had failed to produce a child for the Kennedy clan, and Jack was rarely home. ‘Home’ was something one had within oneself, not bricks and mortar, and hers was gone. Irving Avenue was her bolt-hole, little more now. It was an open secret that she and Jack were estranged.
Conspicuously unattached in England, she was invited to weekend hunt-parties in Sussex. Lee wasn’t keen, but she lent her sister the essentials: a hunt cap, tweed jacket, white shirt and buff breeches. The wife of someone else provided riding boots to fit her big feet, plus spurs, gloves and a crop.
When given the choice, she joined the non-jumping set, cantering across fallow fields and burnished woodland – going off on her own when she could. She was like a forest, like the dark interlacing of the oakwood, humming inaudibly with myriad unfolding buds. Sussex mornings were misty. The tree canopies, golden in the early weeks, faded to sepia by late October. She missed, more than she’d imagined possible, the fall colors of New England – the vivid crimsons, yellows and magentas – but her mood suited this muted Sussex gold. The branches embraced an emptiness. From the old wood came an ancient melancholy, somehow soothing to her…Her horse kicked up leaves, bracken, chestnuts and mushroom caps. The scent on the breeze was one of resignation, the dying of summer, no matter how deceptively warm the day. White-bottomed rabbits beat a retreat as her horse approached. Squirrels watched from branches, beady-eyed. The wood was her one refuge, her sanctuary. Here, she was at home. The woodland was a home. She could have lived like this. No one watched. Her thoughts were her own.
When the downland hills reared into view, she felt their green kick of life. It was a kind of joy, a landscape into which she could imagine disappearing: the hills were intimate in scale. Their flanks rose up, unexpectedly smooth. Their haunches nestled tenderly. Often in the early mornings, the hilltops hovered strangely above rings of mist, as if they had broken away to float freely into the atmosphere.
Only the barking and whelping of the hounds in full cry disturbed the peace of those mornings – English foxhounds, perhaps fifty or more. Yet, the hunt, with its ritualized staging of civilization and animality, of restraint and blood-letting, fascinated her. She felt she understood it, even if nothing she’d known among the well-to-do of the American East Coast compared.
By the kennel, one of the keepers, a ‘whipper-in’, demonstrated for her, the American visitor, what made a fine hound: a well-muscled top-line along the spine, he said, holding the dog steady, and ‘a straight stern’. The ‘stern’, she inferred, was the tail.
An intelligent head on a hound, he said, was neither too narrow nor too wide. It wanted a deep chest for good-sized lungs and a powerful engine of a heart. The nose mattered even more than the eyes, because it was the scent of the prey that drew the hounds on till they cornered or treed their prey.
After asking if it was alright to do so, she bent to pat it, but she stumbled back at the force of his muzzle in her crotch. She blushed hotly but the keeper laughed, saying something about ‘scent’ she couldn’t make out, and irrationally, she hated him for his laughter, the intrusion, for the over-familiarity. He was handsome, confident on his feet, with a sly cock to his chin, and perhaps he’d imagined that gave him the right, with her there on her own. Had she not thought he would have been amused by her complaint, she would have reported him. To put him in his place. But that wasn’t what she wanted. Not actually. As it was, she hated England for all its enforced ‘places’: its subservience; its infinite, tacit hierarchies; its taut smiles and simmering resentments. Yet, if she stayed in Europe much longer, its ‘ways’ would be in her, a part of her, and she would – were she then to return to the States – find her homeland, with its comparative immaturity, ease and easy affluence, forever wanting.
She and Jack spoke only as much as was necessary to avoid drawing the attention of his family. She was, officially, having a ‘restful’ time (‘after the baby’) with her sister. He was ‘working hard’. He filled their brief long-distance calls with politics. The British and French had landed over a thousand paratroopers along the Suez Canal. The President was furious with Anthony Eden; Ike had warned the British not to invade, but, being the British, they had assumed they knew better. Privately, she couldn’t bring herself to care.
Within a few weeks, rumors of a divorce no one had discussed reached the offices of Time. Joe Sr., not Jack, sent word via Lee. Jackie had to make up her mind.
She returned to Hyannis Port in mid-November, in time for the photograph for the Kennedy clan Christmas card of 1956. Inwardly, if not outwardly, she was changed. She carried a sense of another self she might have been, in France perhaps, or possibly England; of other truths glimpsed. Perhaps that was why, she realized only now, she’d not taken up the prize job with Vogue Paris when offered it years before, or the interview with the C.I.A.’s Paris office. She might never have returned.
It did mean, however, that she was no longer, in her own assessment of herself, consistent. Her ‘porcelain’ self had chips and cracks. She no longer recognized the woman who had formerly dispensed worthy advice and served as a winsome example to other young wives. Her sense of humor grew sharper, cleverer, and more wayward. She became, at once, less shy and more private. She minded loneliness less. She read endlessly while her husband traveled the country. She listened to fewer people in the Kennedy ‘world’. It was a calming thing, self-possession. She had, too, come to understand the spell of bodies, of presence, and with it, the power of silence, including her own.
All the while, she grew more and more active behind-the-scenes in Jack’s campaign. ‘None of this means anything, anything at all, if you’re not with me,’ he’d said quietly, to her back one night, when he’d sensed she was awake.
She’d lain still and hadn’t replied. They had agreed. He knew they had. Him as much as her. She didn’t want to spoil his chances – and she wouldn’t. But if he didn’t win the Party nomination, they’d separate, officially.
Even so, as the campaign took shape, she helped him to see that, in the political sphere, it wasn’t popularity he had to strive for, but an ability to convey sympathy, whether it was to a packed high-school gymnasium or a lone farmer when he shook his hand. As he rehearsed his speeches, she advised him how and when to gesture. She found fitting quotations and resonant phrases for him to incorporate. Jack never spoke down to anyone. It never occurred to him to do so – and she knew that was his greatest and most natural gift, one which neither Joe Sr. nor his team fully understood or appreciated.
For most of her life, she had got life right enough. She had been pleasing. She had pleased her teachers. She had pleased her college professors. She had pleased the magazines and the Kennedy press team. She had walked with the book always balancing on her head. Now she was the book, and all that lay unspoken between the lines troubled her dreams at night.
She didn’t deceive herself. She knew that, even in all that was wrong with Jack’s ‘girling’, there were probably times, with a naked stranger, when an enlargement of life was possible; of life feeling fuller, more than it could otherwise be in the day-to-day, year-in-year-out marathon of a marriage. The transience of those encounters didn’t necessarily annul that ‘enlargement’ of experience, of life, as much as she might want it to; nor did the claims that such encounters were only about physical sensation or quick gratification. ‘Society’ simply needed to pretend it believed that. Everyone needed, collectively, to agree that such encounters were meaningless. In that way, although never quite sanctioned, they could continue.
Did most married men cheat on their wives? She was fairly sure the majority did – but the deception, she believed, lay as much in the words ‘It meant nothing’ as in the act itself. Love, sex, all that sort of stuff, just water-ices. Lick it up and forget it. If you don’t hang on to it in your mind, it’s nothing. Sex especially – nothing.
The unfortunate truth was that a fling or an affair didn’t have to be deeply personal to be meaningful. The impersonal, it dawned on her, didn’t preclude intimacy. Who didn’t sometimes need the sudden flare of transformation? Who wasn’t afraid of being cut off from the quick of life? Her husband was no different than others. Women and wives also wanted nothing less than life – a felt life – but the stakes for them, for her – were normally too great to risk. Even well-off women she knew depended on the clothing budgets and ‘pin money’ their husbands bestowed. And actually, when it came to it, she wanted transformation with Jack, her charismatic, adored husband, no one else. But sun-gods, she had come to understand, were – perhaps, by their very nature – incapable of singular beams of love.
She raged inwardly at some point most days, humiliated. But if she couldn’t forgive her husband – and why should she? – she did understand him, better than she wanted to. Jack was a man who ran deep; he was a spiritual man, if not in the church-and-incense way that Bobby was. Jack, she knew, craved that rawest form of soul – the exclamation point of life-force, ejaculation, the transcendence of the body. Having come close to death, first in the war on his patrol-boat and then, twice, on the operating table, he needed – over and over again – the sensation of, the explosion of, life itself.
