Jackie, page 11
I ride and the sun climbs into the sky, the world a rush of dizzying passionless green.
When I get home, he’s at his desk, working. He looks up, concerned.
“Where were you?” he says.
“You can’t think they don’t notice, Jack.”
“What?”
“Last night. You and Silver Dress,” I say, a crushing pressure in my chest. “You can’t think I don’t care, and you can’t think people will respect a senator who disrespects his wife.”
We barely speak for the next few weeks beyond the courtesies of two people who happen to share the same house. I leave his breakfast on the table. I stop calling to ask if he’ll be home for dinner or if his plans have changed. At first it seems to surprise him. But then he adjusts, like he thinks this must be what I want. Maybe he prefers it this way. No extra emotion to manage. He’s in his space. I’m in mine. We are two icebergs adrift, floating on, until one evening in June. I’ve just finished packing for a week with my mother in Newport. I walk into his study. He’s by his desk, bent over, his face a mix of fury and pain and despair. So odd, that look. It takes me a moment to realize he’s crying. He can’t bend down to pick up a jar of paper clips spilled on the floor.
* * *
…
“The fifth vertebra is entirely collapsed. Surgery—a lumbosacral fusion—will be the best option.”
“Will it work?” Jack says.
“There are risks. Because of the Addison’s.”
“But there’s a chance?”
The doctor nods. “Yes.” He pauses, then, “Without it, you may lose your ability to walk.”
I watch Jack’s face as the words hit.
* * *
—
October 1954. In the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, they prepare his body with medication for ten days. Afterward, they declare the surgery a success. But even before the fever spikes, I know something is wrong. His eyes are different, glassy. A blurred look.
“Are you all right, Jack?”
“Just woozy from the pain meds.”
I lie down beside him. Night. The lamp is off. Through the sheets, his skin burns, lips dry. I hold him gently; he seems so vulnerable, frail. He stirs. I should tell the nurse. I should tell them.
“I love you, Jack,” I say.
He opens his eyes—a weak smile. “And you’d think that would be enough to fix it.”
The nurses press into the room. They soak him in antibiotics, pack him in ice, but the heat in his body keeps rising. I call Joe and Rose. They come. Rose prays, the rosary clicking, prayers under her breath. Joe sits by the bed, talking to Jack as he floats in and out of consciousness. I kneel on the other side of him, my face on his hot open palm, tears sharp. I’m going to lose him. I don’t want to lose him.
The doctor comes, another nurse behind him explaining we have to leave.
“He needs a priest,” Rose cries. Joe draws her out into the corridor. Mrs. Kennedy. That’s the doctor. I kiss his forehead, skin like fire. Jack. Stay with me. Please, Mrs. Kennedy, you have to leave now. I suddenly realize they’re talking to me.
* * *
—
It’s days before he’s stabilized, another week before he can sit up in the bed. I bring him books, newspapers, magazines. I read aloud to him. Poetry and cartoons in The New Yorker. Movie reviews.
“That one sounds good,” he says.
“Sure, if you’re John Wayne’s grandfather.”
He laughs. I feed him apple crisp. He refuses to eat the gray slab of beef on the dinner tray. I slip ice chips into his mouth. One day when I come in, someone has taped a poster of Marilyn Monroe on the ceiling over his bed. He smiles at me wanly.
“Lem,” he says.
The first time I heard Lem Billings’s name was when Joe told the story of how Lem repeated his senior year at Choate so he could graduate with Jack. That Christmas, Lem showed up at Joe’s house with his battered suitcase and never quite left.
A few days later, I notice the poster has been turned and retaped so Marilyn’s legs are an upside-down V in the air.
“Lem again?” I say.
Jack rolls his eyes. “I’m bored as hell locked up in here.”
* * *
—
He’s been in the hospital for a month when he tells me he wants to write an essay. I listen, ask a few questions. After an hour, we decide it won’t be an essay but a book.
“Thank you,” he says that evening as I get ready to leave.
“That’s a funny thing to say.”
He shrugs. “This book will be good for me.”
I smile at him and sit back down. “Let’s start, then.”
“Tonight?”
“Why not?”
He’s less than 115 pounds. He still can’t walk, and I know that this is what he needs—brusque, practical, no sympathy—a task, all intellect and matter-of-fact.
“You tell me what you want to say, Jack. I’ll write it down. We’ll go from there.”
Jack
He should be grateful. He knows it. Everyone tells him. He’s lucky he isn’t dead. They tell him that too. But he’s just so sick of being sick. Sometimes it seems he’ll never be anything else.
Four days before Christmas, he’s released. They get him up on a gurney and wheel him through the hospital corridors, out into the wind and the rush of the light. The seasons have changed.
He’s missed weeks, months.
* * *
—
Back in the world of his father’s house in Palm Beach, the wide lawn stretching to the seawall, bougainvillea and barrier hedges that separate the house from the road. The sun, the warmth, the pool, the tennis court, a blue-bright sky and lines of palm trees, the brittle rustle of their fronds—those sounds and smells he loves.
Ramps have been installed so he can move from room to room.
* * *
—
“Can I help you do that?” she’ll say.
“Do you need an extra pillow on that chair?”
“Would you like to work on the book today?”
* * *
—
He should be grateful. He’s lucky he survived. Everyone tells him. Lucky to have her. They remark on how devoted she’s been. Collecting research materials, articles, passages, sending drafts of his essays to Sorensen, making notes on the drafts sent back. All for the book he’s writing on eight leaders who embody political courage. Reams of yellow-lined paper, his notes she’s transcribed—all of it organized, then typewritten into pages, margins filled with her handwritten edits.
* * *
—
He makes it through the Chrismas holidays, but by January, he’s ready to crawl out of his skin.
* * *
—
One afternoon by the pool, he overhears her talking to his sister Jean.
“When we decided it was best to spend the winter here in Palm Beach,” she says, “we gave up the lease on the house in Georgetown. We’ve talked about building our own house once we get through this and Jack is well again. Something simple. A one-story high up on a hill, maybe with views of the river.”
“Too expensive,” he says.
She bites down on her lip, a faintly crushed expression on her face he regrets. Her shoulders are sunburned. He floats near the side of the pool. Pushing off with the ball of his foot, he feels a sharp twang in his back.
There’s a Glenn Miller record on the turntable. Strains of music drift.
* * *
—
He can still barely navigate steps. He can’t bear weight on his left side. The pain shoots through his leg, even with the new protocol of steroids and a heel lift.
* * *
—
It’s only at night when he feels alive. His body no longer crippled but as strong as it was in the sea off Japan. Hauling boys out of the gasoline slick, calling for each. He was their captain. He’d made a fatal miscalculation and driven them into danger. He was determined to set the wrong right. He called their names, swimming toward each voice and the thrash of their arms, their faces lit with fear in that hell-black water.
* * *
—
He needs to get strong again. To be better and back in the swing of things. He needs to need her less.
* * *
—
At the end of May, he returns to the Senate. At the Capitol, he waves off the aides and the wheelchair, hobbles up the steps for a press photograph, and strolls in.
Spring 1955
We are back in Washington. I’d hoped things might be better once he recovered enough to return to work, but the more he regains his strength, the more it seems I am alone again.
“What are you thinking?” I ask one morning at breakfast.
“Thinking I’m going to be late,” he says. He picks up his briefcase and limps out the door.
I don’t ask that question again.
* * *
—
Lee invites me to London. She and Michael have bought a flat in Belgravia. Lee has styled every inch of it—curtains, rugs, throws, the divan under the window. There’s no clutter. Even the short piles of books are staged according to size and hue.
“It’s exquisite, Lee,” I say. “I’m not sure I should sit down.”
She throws a party the night I arrive. “For you, Jacks,” she says, that gorgeous pixie smile. Half of London, it seems, swings by to see the wife of the young American senator, son of the former ambassador. I can feel them wonder why I’m alone, and I explain we’re meeting Jack in a few weeks, in France, once work lets up and he can get away. We mingle for a while, then whoosh off to another party, then a dinner dance, then late-night drinks. Lee has orchestrated everything. Weekend trips to Hatley Park and a hunt in Northumberland. Parties and dinners and teas.
“You’re trying to turn me into a firefly, Pekes.”
We’re on a train heading back to Victoria Station. Lee sighs. “I drank too much last night.”
“You can’t swing from party to party forever,” I say.
She looks out the window. I remember what Michael remarked to me one day when Lee was out, how he never quite knew whose hat he’d find on the stand in the hall when he got home.
“Did you find a house in Virginia?” she asks.
“We were looking at one I loved, but Jack grumbled about the price. I found another, and he likes it, so we’re moving ahead. I’ve drawn up plans to redo the bathroom and his dressing room, some shoe shelves built so he doesn’t have to bend over.”
“Are you happy, Jacks?” she asks.
I don’t want that question. She is still staring out the train window, her lovely face eclipsed by a worn sadness, and I realize her question isn’t directed at me.
“Are you all right, Pekes?”
“Just trying to figure a few things out.”
The night before, at a party, I watched my sister come alive, back to her radiant coquette self, when Prince Stanislaw Radziwill dropped by. Stas, as he was called, was a Polish prince with a wild saturnine look. I watched my sister metamorphose under Prince Radziwill’s eyes. The Pekes of my childhood, impossibly beautiful, sexy, and spoiled. Radziwill, I learned, fled Poland at the time of the German invasion of his country. He made it over the border to Switzerland and married a Swiss woman. Her money became his, and he poured it in and out of real estate to make more. Within an hour, I realized that what I was watching between my sister and the prince was a practiced dance.
“I love having you here with me,” Lee says now. “Everyone wants to meet you, and I get to show you off. It reminds me of the summer you brought me to Europe. I loved that summer.” Through the window, the fields rush by. “And now we are married,” she says. “Do you miss Jack?”
“He’s always away, it seems, working. I wish we had more time together.”
Lee nods, her face distorted in the window, tones of yellow and gray; her earrings glint like minnows. “I don’t miss Michael at all. The air is so much more alive as soon as I get free.”
* * *
—
We leave for France. Jack arrives—it’s almost like meeting a stranger, a tourist in a world where I’m at home. He seems awkward, cardboardish, his Boston twang and rumpled American clothes.
We go to visit his father in Cannes. As the car turns up the drive leading to Joe’s villa, Michael says, “I don’t know why you want to be in politics, Jack, when you could be living in this.”
“What is that?” Lee says, pointing to liveried footmen interspersed among the trees that line the drive. They step forward and bow slightly as we pass.
“Just Dad roughing it again this year,” Jack says. I catch the shame in his voice. He hates the display of wealth. He glances at me, a silent plea for me to say something, anything, to lighten it.
“Topiary footmen,” I say. He smiles.
* * *
—
The social roundabout continues. Dinner with the Wrightsmans in honor of the empress of Iran. A formal dance in Monte Carlo. A friend of Lee’s has lent us his house overlooking the sea. Sitting with Jack at breakfast one morning, I realize we haven’t argued once since he arrived. Everything feels easier between us, less coldness, that sweet banter flickering back, and for a moment I want to stay in this world, however rarefied and unreal, that is not ours.
He’s across the small wrought-iron table from me, reading the newspaper. A headline on the front page: Chicago Boy Lynched.
“What’s that article, Jack?”
He murmurs something about being done in a moment. I look down at the garden, the ruffled heads of trees. A motorboat moves toward the dock below.
“He’s here, Jackie,” Lee calls from inside the house.
Jack looks up from the paper.
“Who?”
“Gianni Agnelli,” I say. “Lee arranged for him to take us waterskiing.”
I don’t say: Would you like to come? With his back, he can’t risk the hard bounce over the wake. I pick up my towel and start down the hill to the dock. I can feel his eyes on me.
That night he stays close to me, his hand a slight pressure at the small of my back as we walk into the room to meet the others for drinks before dinner. On our way upstairs at the end of the night, he slides his hand along the back of my thigh. I almost tease him. Did you like watching me step onto that motorboat with Agnelli-of-Fiat-fortune and zoom off? What about it did you like?
In the bedroom, he pulls up my dress and makes love to me against the wall, then pulls me down on the bed. I wrap my legs around his hips and draw him into me, his mouth electric on my body in the dark.
Fall 1955
I’m in the living room in Hyannis Port with Bobby and Jack as they talk about trouble in the South. A Chicago boy, visiting relatives near the Mississippi Delta, was murdered for whistling at a white woman. Two men came by his great-uncle’s house, dragged the boy out, beat him, torched him, drowned him in the river. When he was found, a cotton-gin fan laced with barbed wire had been wrapped four times around his neck to weigh him down.
“Fourteen years old,” Bobby says.
“It’s another country down there,” says Jack.
“If it was, it wouldn’t be your problem.”
“What those men did, it’s unthinkable,” I say.
They both look at me, and for a moment it’s startling—how different they are, their faces, expressions. Jack is cool, surveying, calibrating. Bobby’s eyes, though, are just so bright, an icy fire and an uncommon depth in them I’m not expecting to see.
“Story’s everywhere now because of the photographs,” Bobby says. “A close-up of the boy’s face. Mangled. Another of his mother at the funeral home. She chose open casket.”
“And the men were acquitted,” says Jack.
“Sure. In a Southern trial.”
* * *
—
I’ll remember this conversation months later, when I read an interview with Rosa Parks where she talks about how the real reason she didn’t get up from her bus seat that day was because she couldn’t stop thinking about that murdered boy and his mother who insisted on an open casket so the world could see what had been done—that boy named Emmet Till.
“How do you think it will end?” I ask Bobby when Rosa Parks is arrested for a second time, in early 1956.
“This is only the start,” Bobby says.
“Do you think Jack sees it that way?”
“He’s going to have to.”
I don’t say anything then. I’m curious what, if anything, he’ll add.
But he changes the subject. “How’s the ankle?”
I smile. “I’m afraid that sprain was the end of my touch-football career.” I don’t tell him I’m pregnant. Jack and I agreed not to tell anyone until I see the doctor again, but the secret has forged something new between us, that giddy and tenuous promise—a baby due later this year.
* * *
…
The tone of the meetings has changed. Less casual. More formal strategizing. Endorsing Adlai Stevenson for president, Jack manages to get Stevenson’s top aide, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., as an ally. The rumor is that Adlai is considering Jack as a possible running mate. By April, the meetings at our house in Georgetown are day in, day out—in our living room, in our kitchen, on the front stoop, on the stairs. Meetings after work and over lunch. The men leave the toilet seats up. Their crumbs litter the rug, and their drinks mold rings on the end tables. Once, after a shower, I walk out of the bathroom into a knot of men leaning against the wall in the upstairs hall, the air thick with the smoke of Havana H. Upmann cigars. Silent, they stare as I pass through them like a gauntlet, my body wrapped in a towel, the little bulge of my belly, a second towel around my hair. I walk into the bedroom and shut the door.
