Jackie, page 13
“I think this will be the nursery,” I say.
“We haven’t agreed to buy it.”
“You fell in love with the doorknob.”
He reaches for me then. He touches my waist. An unexpected tenderness. “I like this crooked creaking house you’ve chosen, Jackie.” He slides his hand around my back and draws me to him.
* * *
…
I’m with his parents in Hyannis Port in July when the phone rings. Yusha. Calling to wish me a happy birthday.
“I’d like a few more days of twenty-seven,” I say.
He was in New York the week before, he says. He dropped by Black Jack’s apartment.
“He didn’t look right, Jackie. He’s lost weight. He can’t keep food down.”
“He must have been drinking?”
“No, actually. That’s why I’m mentioning it. He wasn’t.”
I fly to New York and talk my father into going for tests at the hospital. I hold his hand as the doctor explains it’s late-stage liver cancer. Chemotherapy is the only option.
I call Lee.
“Too much jai alai,” I say, “scotch, and Pan Am stewardesses.”
Lee sighs. “Should I come home?”
“You should if you want to.”
“I want to if I should, Jacks. You’ll tell me, won’t you? You’ll know. Tell me when I should come, and I’ll be there.”
But I don’t know. My father fails so fast that by the time I reach the hospital after getting the doctors’ call, he’s gone. Only moments ago, they tell me. My name was the last word he spoke. Is that true? Or is that what they tell all the daughters who aren’t there in time?
Once, on a carriage ride through Central Park when Lee and I were young, ice cream dripped on our dresses and our Sunday gloves. Lee began to cry, afraid of what our mother would say when Black Jack brought us back, how angry she’d be. Lee sobbed. Our father couldn’t understand what she was afraid of. I tried to explain. He just threw back his dark head and laughed, his laughter so bold and free I felt my breath cut, and from then on, I understood that a glove was just a glove and what mattered was the decadent sunshine, the gorgeous midsummer patterns of sky and park and city, the heat and the green. What mattered was the sugar and cream dissolving on my tongue, the sweet sticky aftermath of that pleasure on our lips and wrists.
After the funeral, I tell Lee, “You should take what you want of Daddy’s things. All I want is the desk.” The desk is mahogany, French Empire style, with ormolu hardware and a slant front. “You can have everything else, Lee.”
“I don’t want anything,” my sister says.
* * *
—
When Jack leaves again for the campaign trail, I drive him to the airport. The air is humid still, and warm, but we are into the fall, and the slant of light has changed.
“Don’t overdo exercise while I’m gone,” he says.
“Exercise is good for me.”
“Just not too much.”
“Someone’s going to have to run after this baby.”
It makes him happy, every time I say that word.
“I feel like I’ve forgotten something,” he says, looking through the battered leather briefcase. He moves some papers into a folder, then snaps the briefcase closed.
“Just don’t forget to come home,” I say.
He leans in to kiss me at the door that leads out to the airstrip; I can feel his breath faintly cool, the white rush of the sky behind.
I stay in New York while he’s gone. I take long walks in the park. Every morning, I read the papers: Eisenhower sends in the 101st Airborne to protect nine Black children at a Little Rock high school; the Russians shock the United States by launching Sputnik, the first satellite, into space. I read Faith and History by the philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr. I cut a passage from The Observer to give to Jack when he comes home, a quote from the French filmmaker Jean Cocteau:
…what is history after all?
History is facts which become lies in the end; legends are lies which become history….
* * *
—
I watch the leaves turn, and I think about my father, how he will never meet my baby. Loving him was like trying to put my arms around the sun—I could never quite keep up with the speed of the loss, even knowing it was coming, too fast, too soon, and no matter what I did or how much I wanted, I would not be ready. There would be loose ends, always, for what I had not said, for what I could not bridge or hold or save.
Lee and I had decided there would be summer flowers strewn across his casket. Black-eyed Susans, cornflowers, lilies, too, for the heartbroken beauty of their scent. Fierce colors, wild blooms. And those summer flowers are what I hold in my mind as I let go to the rising pull of anesthesia the day before Thanksgiving.
“Please, let all be well,” I say quietly. “Let my baby be well, whole and safe and beautiful. Let all things be well.”
* * *
—
I will always look back on the day, November 27, 1957, as the happiest of my life. Jack bending toward me, our sweet baby girl in his arms, an expression on his face I’ve never seen—it kicks my heart over.
“How lovely she is, Jackie.” Light pours from his face toward the tiny being wrapped in a blanket in his arms, his hand cupped around her skull. He sits on the edge of the bed, flowers he brought on the table behind him, and it is just the three of us, alone—floating on a raft cut loose from the world. He will always look at our daughter just that way, like he needs to map each detail, each feature—the bond between them tensile, changeless, transcendent.
In the hospital room, her tiny face scrunches up. She opens her mouth to cry.
“Shhh,” he whispers. She quiets at his voice.
1958
We move into the house on N Street. I hire a housekeeper and a nanny for Caroline. It’s a simple, informal life we begin to build. When Jack is home, we go to the movies with our friends Ben and Tony Bradlee. We host small dinner parties, games of charades, and cutthroat Monopoly tournaments. Charley Bartlett will invariably complain, “Pull no punches, Jack. You play like those little hotels are real.” Every other month, I drag Jack to the Dancing Class at the Sulgrave Club. He doesn’t love it, but he goes. He’ll dance a bit, stay near me for a while, then peel off in search of some like-minded political soul to hash over the current state of affairs. If he doesn’t find anyone, he’ll drift back to ask how long I want to stay. I send him on another lap around the room—glorious and bored, a tiger in a cage.
* * *
—
“A drink, Mrs. Auchincloss?” Jack asks one afternoon that spring. My mother’s come to visit.
“I came for a baby,” she says.
“Caroline’s sleeping.”
“Then I’ll wait.” Her smile is tight and cool. She’s liked Jack less since we lost Arabella—the fact that he wasn’t there, that we couldn’t reach him, and that he didn’t rush home when we did. “You’ve made some lovely changes to this room, Jackie,” my mother says.
Jack smiles. “Bunny’s helping.”
“Adele Astaire introduced me to Bunny Mellon,” I tell my mother.
“The Listerine family?”
“She’s become a friend,” I say. “Her own house is gorgeous. I’ve told her I even love the stale candy in the antique jars.”
“Speaking of antiques,” says Jack, “Mrs. Auchincloss, I’d like your opinion on Jackie’s new chairs. Louis XVI chairs, she explained when I got the bill. I’ve told her a chair is a chair. You just need to sit in it.”
I laugh. “All those men working on your campaign, Jack, need comfortable chairs to sit in. They’re hostage for hours in those meetings.”
Jack rolls his eyes. “What do you think, Mrs. Auchincloss?”
“Please call me Janet.” Her smile softens a bit.
“Janet, take a look at this,” he says, picking up a copy of the April 21 Life magazine. On the cover, Caroline is on Jack’s lap, a pink dress, her bare plump legs poking out, one hand gripping his suit sleeve.
I take the magazine and flip through to find the article.
“Where are we, Jack?” I keep flipping the pages. “Oh, here. Way back. Page 132, right after a piece about learning to surf in Australia.”
“It’s the cover that matters,” says Jack, a little defensive, which makes me smile.
“I’d like to surf in Australia.” I hand the open magazine back to my mother.
“I’d like a baby,” says my mother.
“I’ll get her for you,” Jack says, heading toward the stairs.
“He loves a reason to wake her up,” I say.
My mother starts to say something, then doesn’t. She looks around. “I like the chairs.”
“You don’t think it’s too much?”
She glances at me. “It’s like anything else, Jackie. Live with it for a while, see how you feel.”
* * *
…
Jack asks me to go on a short campaign trip with him through Massachusetts. An out-and-back in May. Three stops in the morning, a break for lunch, more stops in the afternoon. In the car heading west, I sit in the backseat with Kenny O’Donnell. Kenny was Bobby’s roommate in college and worked on Jack’s first campaign. Jack calls him “our play-only-hardball gatekeeper.”
“How long is lunch, Kenny?” I ask.
“Two hours.”
“That’s a long lunch.”
“It’s the deal we made with the ambassador to make sure Jack doesn’t run out of gas.”
I smile. “Nothing like making deals with the ambassador.”
“They told me you were fragile,” Kenny says.
“Fragile?”
* * *
—
We walk through the restaurant to a back room. There are plenty of open tables up front, but it’s clear this has been prearranged.
“No menus?” I ask Kenny.
“Steak and potatoes are already ordered.”
“You eat the same thing every day?”
“Pretty much. And everyone gets a glass of milk.”
I laugh. “Might one order something in addition to a glass of milk?” The whole thing feels weirdly clandestine—the gangster back room, lunch all planned. I ask the server for a glass of wine and get out a cigarette. Jack shakes his head at me and mouths, No. I put the pack away.
“Now, let’s get this straight,” says Jack. “Kenny, where’s your pencil? Start getting this down.” He works through a list: who to call first, who to call after, what needs to be prepped. A litany of directives. Kenny’s at his shorthand list; the others talk among themselves. Once, before we were married, when I went up to see Jack in Boston, he introduced me to someone nicknamed “Onions” Burke and someone else called “Juicy” Grenara. Then we all went for dinner at the Ritz.
The food arrives. Jack talks and gestures, his pale eyes cool as Kenny takes notes on the back of an envelope. The pencil tip breaks.
“All set, then,” says Jack. “Let’s eat.”
“I have a question, Kenny,” I say. “What exactly do you do with all those things Jack tells you? You write them down. Then what? Go down the list and check them off one by one?”
The table falls silent.
“Funny you should ask,” Kenny says. “You know what I do? I wait until he calms down, then I do the things that need to get done and throw the envelope out.”
“You son of a bitch,” Jack says. “I bet that is what you do.”
I laugh. “Oh, Jack, I’m sure Kenny would never not do every single task you ask him to do, right, Kenny?”
Jack relaxes then, the easy smile that’s hard to read. “Just like my wife, aren’t you, Kenny? I say one thing, and you go and do exactly what you want.” But he is laughing too.
* * *
—
I recount this for our friend Joe Alsop a few weeks later—an abridged version of my first political trip and the steak-and-potatoes routine.
Joe Alsop has called me “Darling Jackie” ever since he reneged on his offer to rent us his house in Georgetown. But I like him, and I love his incisive political column, Matter of Fact, and his salon-style dinner parties on Dumbarton Ave. Alsop has a sprawling library, Savile Row waistcoats, and exquisite taste in food. He has a cagey wit and a knack for bringing together the right group of people. “An evening is like a room,” he told me once, an elegant wave of his cigarette. “You can construct a room so guests feel at once a sense of ease and excitement: formal dress, then toss in a martini and a topic of hard conversation, some thorny national issue launched as a query. Watch the room ignite. Alliances are forged. Deals get made. Everyone thinks it’s just a dinner party.” He glanced at me to be sure I was following, then added, “Never discount the bore factor. No bores allowed with eight or fewer people. Only half a bore with ten.”
Joe Alsop hasn’t always liked Jack, I learned recently. Apparently Jack did some crass thing once and got himself crossed off the soirée list, until he married me.
That particular spring evening, Alsop introduces us to Kay and Phil Graham, loyal supporters of Lyndon Johnson. In his introduction, he calls Jack “the antidote to the sclerotic Eisenhower administration we’re all so tired of.”
Low music in the background—Ella Fitzgerald.
Phil Graham looks at Jack. “You’re after the presidency?”
“That’s right,” Jack says.
“You’re young. Why not wait another four?”
“Well, Phil, first, I think I’m as qualified to run as anybody, except for Lyndon. Second, if I don’t run, whoever wins will be there for eight years and that will influence his successor. Third, if I don’t run, I’ll be in the Senate for eight more years, and as a potential future candidate, I’ll have to vote politically, which means I’ll end up a mediocre senator and a lousy candidate.”
Silence, then Graham says, “That makes sense.”
Alsop takes my arm. “Jackie, come with me. You must try the terrapin soup.”
“That wasn’t politics,” I say once we’re out of earshot, “what you just orchestrated. That was art.”
* * *
…
August. I travel with Jack to Europe for a Senate Foreign Relations Committee trip. It’s Gianni Agnelli who tells us that Churchill is a guest on Aristotle Onassis’s yacht. It’s also Agnelli who procures an invitation for us. Not to dinner. That point is underscored. But for drinks an hour before.
* * *
—
The mind is water.
That’s the thought that strikes me as I step onto the deck of the Christina. He is there, Onassis, a man I’ve heard so much about—shipping magnate; Don Juan of the rich; notorious lover of La Divina, the famed opera singer Maria Callas. Their sex and fights are legendary. He’s a man whose pockets are lined with ruthless wealth and luck and stars.
Onassis, Jack told me, has no fondness for Bobby, who scuppered a deal Onassis was trying to make in Saudi Arabia. That evening, though, he greets us warmly.
“A tour?” he asks. Jack takes my arm as Onassis leads us through the converted warship, deck to deck, stem to stern, through the famous bar and bathrooms of white marble sourced from the same quarry as the Parthenon. There are painted fish and mosaics, lapis-crusted fireplaces—all of it opulent, lavish, shameless.
“What do you think, Mrs. Kennedy?” Onassis asks.
“It’s beautiful.”
“Many things are beautiful.”
“It reminds me of a line in a poem. ‘La Vie Antérieure.’ ”
“The life past.”
“A kind of Xanadu.”
“Ah. You will tell me the rest sometime.”
Jack is a few feet away, studying a nautical oil painting. He’s heard our exchange. Such a curious man Onassis is. His stumpy height, rugged face, hair greased with brilliantine.
“Shall we go on?” he asks.
We come into the salon, where the others, including Churchill, are gathered. The master of history slumps in a chair, white cuffs, handkerchief, black suit, and bow tie, the broad famous jowls of that face. Onassis brings Jack over to introduce them. I follow partway, then hang back. Jack sits down beside Churchill, looking awkward, as he tries to engage the old statesman. Churchill’s shoulders curl forward. He’s already into his cups.
What kind of memory lives in a man like that? A man who has passed through trials and turns of history. Who has failed and risked, lost and achieved, risen and fallen and risen again. What remains?
Churchill turns in his chair toward a dark-haired man on his left and says, in a booming voice, “I knew your father. Hated him. Isolationist and defeatist. He knew nothing of diplomacy. They tell me you’re different. How are you different?”
The man’s face is blank as Jack leans across to say that he is the one, son of the reviled ambassador. Churchill turns back to Jack. A snap of recognition, putting the face to the story. But it’s hard going. Jack stumbles through the titles of Churchill’s oeuvre: “I’ve read every one,” I hear him say, and I remember that day in his childhood room in Hyannis Port on the Fourth of July. I remember what I saw in his face as he read aloud to me—the want, the dream, the reach.
It’s why I stayed.
Jack keeps talking to Churchill, trying to light the grim silence, and he is again that boy from the little bedroom—this is his childhood hero. The writer, the statesman, the soldier who failed at the battle of Gallipoli, then led the fight against Hitler, no compromise, no appeasement. The old prime minister is at best a shrunken nodding version of his former self, but Jack speaks to him, his face animated, like these are better days. Churchill just looks bored. He drains his glass, pushes it toward Jack, nodding to the bar. Jack stands, wincing slightly—his back. He takes the empty glass and starts across the room. It’s then that I notice Onassis standing alone by the wall, a painting behind him that looks like a Goya, watching me with a curious unwavering intensity, watching this tableau play out. The smile on his face jackal-like, his eyes with their rude desire. Jack pauses on his way to me with Churchill’s glass. The rest of the room continues to bustle and mill, the tinkling sound of glasses, plates, passed hors d’oeuvres. Lamps and candles flicker as a warm breeze blows the dusk through the open doors, the night like a tide sweeping in. The sunset colors are fragile, and Onassis is still looking at me—he doesn’t seem to care that Jack has noticed, or maybe he does, in a way that turns the night into a sport I didn’t realize we’d been invited on board to play.
