Jackie, page 22
Jack
“You’re not going to Italy to get back at me, are you?” he says.
“Of course not.”
“But it’s August.”
She hesitates, the surface of her eyes shift. There’s something she’s not telling him. Some secret.
She is not unlike him. He realized that when they first met. Leaving is something she knows how to do.
Her face is still and smooth, the way it gets when she knows she’s being watched.
* * *
—
“You always think there’s a game, Jack,” she says. “I’m not playing a game. I love you. You know that. I have to live my life and do things I want to do. While I’m gone, you’re free to do the things you want to do. Then we will both be back.” She stops, but he can infer the rest. We will both be back in our maison blanche. The dinners and candles and music and speeches. It will be the transactional beauty you want, the kind you need to get what you want.
* * *
—
She doesn’t need to say any of this. He hears it. The way she is looking at him. Steady, calm, matter-of-fact.
* * *
—
From somewhere down the hall, the children’s voices.
* * *
—
“We won’t be gone long,” she says, that smile with its implacable charm. “What was it you said to me once, Jack? Flights always return.”
Passionless. Her voice. No inflection. Then she adds, “Please don’t forget, though, before I leave, we have to meet with Bill Walton about the designs for Lafayette Square.”
* * *
—
She is taking Caroline with her to Italy. They’ll be gone for three weeks.
* * *
—
He reads about her trip in the papers. The landing in Rome, the short flight to Salerno, where she and Caroline meet Lee. As the days unfold, photographs appear in the press of Jackie with Gianni Agnelli. In those photographs, something taut in the chemistry between them.
Salinger mentions it.
“You think it’s an issue?” Jack asks.
Salinger nods. “You might want to ask her to cool it.”
* * *
—
He misses her. He misses Caroline more. He misses the shape of his daughter resting against him as he reads aloud to her at night, the weight of her small body, half on his lap on the boat as the wet salt wind breaks against his face and strands of her hair blow across his skin, his arm tight around her. John is different, completely of this world, almost two, all boy, rolling on the floor. Caroline, though. He has always felt bound to her in some great, mysterious way, so even when she is right there, with him, she feels like memory. Her sweet voice, her smell, her hands around his neck, her small heart flipping in her chest as she breathes, mouth falling open, eyes closing to sleep as he holds her—those spare moments of their time together alter him in incremental ways, her laughter, her silence, the dimensions of her moods. She has always been the deep of his heart. Like some tiny god. She’s the one soul in the world he feels entirely accountable to. Something of who she is, how she looks at him, what she expects, that sudden naked trust that will break across her small face turned up to his, demanding more than greatness. Goodness. How uncomplicated it is, the way he loves her, the way he’s always loved her, as straightforward and essential as wind.
August 1962
The night before we leave for Italy, Caroline and I stay in New York. I wake to the headlines on August 6.
Marilyn Monroe Kills Self…Found Nude in Bed…Hand on Phone…took 40 Pills
I stare at the paper and feel something inside me cave. Nude in bed, hand on phone.
Who was she calling?
* * *
…
Less Agnelli, More Caroline. That’s the telegram Jack sends to me in Italy a week after we arrive. The curtness stings. I know the photographs he means. We were all there, walking together, but the press cropped the image so it looks like I was walking with Gianni Agnelli alone. Caroline, Lee, Gianni’s wife, Marella, and of course Clint were cut from the frame.
The cliff below the nine-hundred-year-old villa in Ravello is rocky and steep. There are lemon trees, stone archways, wrought-iron gates. There are evenings when we smoke and talk, go out dancing, get back late. In my room, I sit at the small desk and write to Jack. I tell him how different the sky seems here—pure, almost cloudless. The sunsets seem to last forever though it does seem a little dull compared to the invasive gorgeous mess of clouds and glowing color we get on our New England coast.
I mention the Agnellis once, as in Lee, the Agnellis, and I…
I don’t mention the stories Gianni tells about fighting under Mussolini, then switching sides to join the Allies, or his passion for gambling, skiing, fast cars, which he claims are all incarnations of one instinct. I don’t write about the moment I mentioned that my favorite movie last year was La Dolce Vita and Gianni cried, “Ah, but that’s the title of my life!” and how that made me laugh. How good it feels to laugh like that—some clenched place in me released.
* * *
…
Home at the end of August. We spend the weekend as a family in Newport. Caroline and I share stories of our trip. Before Jack leaves for Washington, he asks me to go for a walk on the beach. He tells me about simmering tensions with the Soviets in Berlin. Riots along the Wall. There are reports he’s seen that contradict other accounts. Things don’t add up.
“Other accounts?”
“While you were gone, we learned Khrushchev sent troops to Cuba. We thought it was just defensive, but last week a U-2 plane spotted what looks like missiles in Cuba.”
“So you’ll respond?”
“Some response. But I can’t give him a reason to stir up Berlin.”
We continue walking; he shifts topics—a game of golf he played last week, a movie he saw while I was away. He jokes that he managed to sit all the way through it. I tell him about a message I received from the curator at the National Gallery, who’s starting to fret about France’s loan of the Mona Lisa and her transatlantic voyage.
“He’s afraid of the risk,” I say.
“Life is risk,” Jack says. It’s a gorgeous day, the air soft and cool; it all feels a little weightless—the anecdotes, the ritual exchange. He tells me about a two-day trip he’s taking to Texas in September. NASA has finished the new spacecraft center of research and development for the Apollo program. The Mercury 7, including John Glenn, will go with him. Jack tells me Lyndon thinks this trip could galvanize national support for the space program.
“We need people to understand this is a choice we’re making as a country. It may not always be easy, but that freedom to choose is a distinctly American freedom.”
“And in space, there’s no Berlin Wall.”
He smiles. “Eisenhower’s crew are griping about the cost.”
“Did you say you’d be away mid-September? What day exactly?”
“September twelfth, I think.”
“Our anniversary.”
A pause in the air. He hadn’t remembered.
* * *
…
Joe flies to Washington for a visit. A bright October afternoon. When the children wake up from their naps, I bundle them into the car. We drive to meet him at the airport.
I push Joe’s wheelchair into the Lincoln Bedroom.
“You’ll stay here,” I say, kissing him on the cheek. “Tonight we’ll have dinner with Jack, and tomorrow I’ve canceled everything to have the day just with you. I want to show you the designs we’ve made for Lafayette Square, the buildings we’re preserving—they are so old and beautiful, Joe. You will love this project. The architect’s nickname is, of all things, Rosebowl. Some ex–football star. He and I were just talking yesterday about how meaningful it is to spruce up the world a bit, if you have the chance, leave it better than you found it. You understand that, dear Joe, don’t you?”
He looks at me—his sweet, incomplete smile—an intermingling of grief and gratitude in his eyes.
* * *
—
The next morning, Jack and I are still in bed when Mac Bundy brings in photographs of ballistic missiles armed with nuclear warheads near Cristobal, Cuba. Large enough to reach the United States.
“Khrushchev can’t do this to me,” Jack says. He pulls on his clothes and strides out. Later, when he comes home, his face is strained.
“Don’t ask,” he says. “For now, the less you know, the better.”
“What do you need from me?”
“Go about your day as planned.”
“I’m with your father all day.”
“Good. And we’ve got that dinner in Georgetown tonight.”
“Won’t you need to be here?”
“Bobby can be me where I need him.” I realize it then. He’s already slipping Bobby into meetings with his core group of advisors from the National Security Council: the ExComm. Bobby is the only one he trusts.
In Georgetown that night, we play our way through the dinner like nothing’s amiss. As soon as we return to the White House, Jack leaves for a debrief. He comes home late, after midnight.
“What’s wrong, Jack?”
“Let’s go to sleep, kid.” He smiles at me, but the smile does not feel true.
* * *
—
The next day, a new clip in the air. I bring the children to see Jack at the Oval Office. I want to ask about Cuba, the missile sites, Soviet ships spotted offshore, what choices he’s weighing now. I know there are at least two: air strikes on the missile sites, or a naval quarantine to stop ships carrying weapons bound for Cuba. But if the United States intervenes, will Khrushchev use it as an excuse to move on his longtime threat to take Berlin? What then? Another round of sparring, or war?
We watch the children scramble over the rug. They play hide-and-seek around the desk. John does a somersault. Off-kilter. Caroline just stands there, still for a moment, watching her brother, the perfect slope of her cheek, a lovely smudge of sunlight on the bone.
What will they inherit?
I glance at Jack. His eyes are on me.
“This,” he says. “Caroline and John. They’re what I bring into that Cabinet Room, to make the right decision, a sane decision, while the whole fucking world’s on its ear.”
“Tell me what’s happening, Jack.”
“At this point, there’s nothing I can tell you.”
I look at him, wait. Then he says, “I knew it would take time to reach a solution. It never struck me there might not be one.”
* * *
—
I take the children and Joe to Glen Ora, as planned. Jack flies to Chicago, as planned. But within a day Clint informs me Jack’s returning to the White House with a head cold. A pretense. Jack calls to say he wants us home in Washington that afternoon. He wants me to host a small dinner. That evening he acts like his usual self—peppering our friends with questions about Frank Sinatra, Lord Beaverbrook, and that wild photograph of the model lying on a white bearskin, sucking her thumb. He says nothing about Cuba or Khrushchev.
Later, he tells me he’s approved a naval quarantine of ships passing into Cuba.
“A blockade?”
“A blockade’s an act of war. We can’t call it that.” The following evening, he says, he’ll make an address to the nation, announcing that the United States will not allow Soviet shipment of any offensive military equipment to Cuba. He’ll call on Khrushchev publicly to end this. He’ll cite the 1930s as a clear example that aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged, will lead to war.
People have begun to leave the city. Growing fears of a nuclear attack. It feels like everything and everyone around us is peeling away. The sense of time resting on a blade.
“It’s time for you to go, Jackie,” he says. “Move the children closer to the shelter.”
“We’re going to stay with you.”
“You’re not afraid?”
“I am afraid, because you are.” He won’t like me saying it. I say it anyway, and I see the split second of his anger because I’ve acknowledged what he doesn’t want to feel.
“If you’re afraid you should go,” he says.
“I am going to stay, Jack.”
* * *
—
From then on, there is no waking or sleeping. One day flows into the next. When he comes home for a nap or a rest, I lie down with him. When he calls, I go to his office. He’ll pull on his coat, and we’ll walk. Sometimes he talks, other times we walk in silence. One evening at dinner, he tells me that while taking a swim in the pool he kept thinking of how every decision he’d make in the next twelve hours would set in motion the following twelve, then the twelve after that, and it would just go on that way as long as the threat of the crisis continued. As he floated in the pool, he says, he remembered a painting he made years ago, in Brooklyn during the 1960 campaign. A watercolor of boats in Sheepshead Bay. He remembered the feeling he had working the pigment on the paper as he painted the wind, how he wanted to capture that wind in the landscape so it bled through the abstract shapes of boats and piers, their outlines half dissolved, because the motion of the world did not differentiate, and all we imagine to be permanent, solid, is always on the verge of being swept away.
* * *
—
John wakes up the next day with a fever. By noon, it’s over 100 degrees. While Jack is in meetings, I get John into the car and take him to the doctor.
* * *
—
Soviet tankers approach the U.S. quarantine cordon in the waters near Cuba.
A hostile letter arrives from Khrushchev, stating the U.S. blockade is a violation of terms. In the letter, he implies his ships will run it.
* * *
—
Jack comes back late—two, three in the morning.
“What happened?” I ask.
“I told our men to postpone the challenge to Khrushchev’s first ship, an oil tanker, the Bucharest. I sent word to Khrushchev suggesting we both hold up until we can talk. I’m not sure it was the right thing to do. It puts the ball in his court. Gives him time.”
“John’s fever is down,” I say. He looks startled and I realize he’d forgotten, then he looks relieved.
* * *
—
On Friday two messages come in, private Teletype direct from Khrushchev, appealing to Jack to de-escalate and offering consideration of terms.
* * *
—
Jack sends me to Glen Ora with the children. He promises to join us the following day.
Early on Sunday, the news is announced that the two nations have reached an agreement.
* * *
—
I’m waiting for him when the helicopter touches down. As we walk inside, he tells me he can only stay for a few hours. We go into the bedroom to talk. Yesterday, he says, it all nearly derailed. An American U-2 plane was shot down, the pilot killed, and McNamara contended that war was not just imminent but inevitable. Jack waited, though. No retaliation, he told McNamara. Not yet. He sent another private message back to Khrushchev, promising to withdraw missiles from Turkey if they could reach terms on Cuba, but he also said that if the compromise on Turkey leaked out, the United States would deny it. Khrushchev conceded and agreed to remove Soviet missile sites from Cuba.
“You must feel good about what you’ve done, Jack,” I say.
“Well, it’s done.”
I smile. “Give yourself half a day to enjoy it.”
“Can’t get complacent.”
Just a month ago we were looking at portraits of Lincoln, the progression of his face during his years in the White House. “Older and older, like what’s happening to me,” Jack had remarked.
“Something else,” he says to me now. “I need you at home to plan some victory dinners.”
“You mean home at the White House?”
“Yes.”
“I can do that.”
“And you should know we’ve agreed to seize Cuba and make Bobby mayor of Havana.”
I smile. I’ve bitten down one of my nails. I take a nail file from the bureau and start to work on the torn edge.
Jack
A Sunday in November, Glen Ora.
The rim of the tub digs into his shoulder, that spot where the muscle weaves against the collarbone. It’s not an unpleasant pain. Dave Powers sits on the toilet, reading off appointments for the upcoming week.
As he sinks deeper into the warm water, he thinks about his life. He’s forty-five years old. There’s less future loaded into him than past.
His wife walks in.
Her white shirt wrinkled from being tucked into her riding pants, but she’s not wearing pants, nothing but the shirt, boots, a riding whip in her hand. It’s unexpectedly violent, the whip and that glimpse of her thigh. Intentional. Her head tips toward her shoulder and she looks at Dave Powers, who is trying to keep his eyes focused on her face.
“Thank you, Dave.” She smiles, tilting her head toward the door. “Please cancel the next few hours.”
Powers gathers papers together and bumbles out, the door closing behind him, and she laughs, that quietly wicked laugh he loves.
She sits down on the edge of the tub. “How’s the bath?” She runs her fingers through the water, her fingertips brush him. “Warm enough?”
“You’re not going to Italy to get back at me, are you?” he says.
“Of course not.”
“But it’s August.”
She hesitates, the surface of her eyes shift. There’s something she’s not telling him. Some secret.
She is not unlike him. He realized that when they first met. Leaving is something she knows how to do.
Her face is still and smooth, the way it gets when she knows she’s being watched.
* * *
—
“You always think there’s a game, Jack,” she says. “I’m not playing a game. I love you. You know that. I have to live my life and do things I want to do. While I’m gone, you’re free to do the things you want to do. Then we will both be back.” She stops, but he can infer the rest. We will both be back in our maison blanche. The dinners and candles and music and speeches. It will be the transactional beauty you want, the kind you need to get what you want.
* * *
—
She doesn’t need to say any of this. He hears it. The way she is looking at him. Steady, calm, matter-of-fact.
* * *
—
From somewhere down the hall, the children’s voices.
* * *
—
“We won’t be gone long,” she says, that smile with its implacable charm. “What was it you said to me once, Jack? Flights always return.”
Passionless. Her voice. No inflection. Then she adds, “Please don’t forget, though, before I leave, we have to meet with Bill Walton about the designs for Lafayette Square.”
* * *
—
She is taking Caroline with her to Italy. They’ll be gone for three weeks.
* * *
—
He reads about her trip in the papers. The landing in Rome, the short flight to Salerno, where she and Caroline meet Lee. As the days unfold, photographs appear in the press of Jackie with Gianni Agnelli. In those photographs, something taut in the chemistry between them.
Salinger mentions it.
“You think it’s an issue?” Jack asks.
Salinger nods. “You might want to ask her to cool it.”
* * *
—
He misses her. He misses Caroline more. He misses the shape of his daughter resting against him as he reads aloud to her at night, the weight of her small body, half on his lap on the boat as the wet salt wind breaks against his face and strands of her hair blow across his skin, his arm tight around her. John is different, completely of this world, almost two, all boy, rolling on the floor. Caroline, though. He has always felt bound to her in some great, mysterious way, so even when she is right there, with him, she feels like memory. Her sweet voice, her smell, her hands around his neck, her small heart flipping in her chest as she breathes, mouth falling open, eyes closing to sleep as he holds her—those spare moments of their time together alter him in incremental ways, her laughter, her silence, the dimensions of her moods. She has always been the deep of his heart. Like some tiny god. She’s the one soul in the world he feels entirely accountable to. Something of who she is, how she looks at him, what she expects, that sudden naked trust that will break across her small face turned up to his, demanding more than greatness. Goodness. How uncomplicated it is, the way he loves her, the way he’s always loved her, as straightforward and essential as wind.
August 1962
The night before we leave for Italy, Caroline and I stay in New York. I wake to the headlines on August 6.
Marilyn Monroe Kills Self…Found Nude in Bed…Hand on Phone…took 40 Pills
I stare at the paper and feel something inside me cave. Nude in bed, hand on phone.
Who was she calling?
* * *
…
Less Agnelli, More Caroline. That’s the telegram Jack sends to me in Italy a week after we arrive. The curtness stings. I know the photographs he means. We were all there, walking together, but the press cropped the image so it looks like I was walking with Gianni Agnelli alone. Caroline, Lee, Gianni’s wife, Marella, and of course Clint were cut from the frame.
The cliff below the nine-hundred-year-old villa in Ravello is rocky and steep. There are lemon trees, stone archways, wrought-iron gates. There are evenings when we smoke and talk, go out dancing, get back late. In my room, I sit at the small desk and write to Jack. I tell him how different the sky seems here—pure, almost cloudless. The sunsets seem to last forever though it does seem a little dull compared to the invasive gorgeous mess of clouds and glowing color we get on our New England coast.
I mention the Agnellis once, as in Lee, the Agnellis, and I…
I don’t mention the stories Gianni tells about fighting under Mussolini, then switching sides to join the Allies, or his passion for gambling, skiing, fast cars, which he claims are all incarnations of one instinct. I don’t write about the moment I mentioned that my favorite movie last year was La Dolce Vita and Gianni cried, “Ah, but that’s the title of my life!” and how that made me laugh. How good it feels to laugh like that—some clenched place in me released.
* * *
…
Home at the end of August. We spend the weekend as a family in Newport. Caroline and I share stories of our trip. Before Jack leaves for Washington, he asks me to go for a walk on the beach. He tells me about simmering tensions with the Soviets in Berlin. Riots along the Wall. There are reports he’s seen that contradict other accounts. Things don’t add up.
“Other accounts?”
“While you were gone, we learned Khrushchev sent troops to Cuba. We thought it was just defensive, but last week a U-2 plane spotted what looks like missiles in Cuba.”
“So you’ll respond?”
“Some response. But I can’t give him a reason to stir up Berlin.”
We continue walking; he shifts topics—a game of golf he played last week, a movie he saw while I was away. He jokes that he managed to sit all the way through it. I tell him about a message I received from the curator at the National Gallery, who’s starting to fret about France’s loan of the Mona Lisa and her transatlantic voyage.
“He’s afraid of the risk,” I say.
“Life is risk,” Jack says. It’s a gorgeous day, the air soft and cool; it all feels a little weightless—the anecdotes, the ritual exchange. He tells me about a two-day trip he’s taking to Texas in September. NASA has finished the new spacecraft center of research and development for the Apollo program. The Mercury 7, including John Glenn, will go with him. Jack tells me Lyndon thinks this trip could galvanize national support for the space program.
“We need people to understand this is a choice we’re making as a country. It may not always be easy, but that freedom to choose is a distinctly American freedom.”
“And in space, there’s no Berlin Wall.”
He smiles. “Eisenhower’s crew are griping about the cost.”
“Did you say you’d be away mid-September? What day exactly?”
“September twelfth, I think.”
“Our anniversary.”
A pause in the air. He hadn’t remembered.
* * *
…
Joe flies to Washington for a visit. A bright October afternoon. When the children wake up from their naps, I bundle them into the car. We drive to meet him at the airport.
I push Joe’s wheelchair into the Lincoln Bedroom.
“You’ll stay here,” I say, kissing him on the cheek. “Tonight we’ll have dinner with Jack, and tomorrow I’ve canceled everything to have the day just with you. I want to show you the designs we’ve made for Lafayette Square, the buildings we’re preserving—they are so old and beautiful, Joe. You will love this project. The architect’s nickname is, of all things, Rosebowl. Some ex–football star. He and I were just talking yesterday about how meaningful it is to spruce up the world a bit, if you have the chance, leave it better than you found it. You understand that, dear Joe, don’t you?”
He looks at me—his sweet, incomplete smile—an intermingling of grief and gratitude in his eyes.
* * *
—
The next morning, Jack and I are still in bed when Mac Bundy brings in photographs of ballistic missiles armed with nuclear warheads near Cristobal, Cuba. Large enough to reach the United States.
“Khrushchev can’t do this to me,” Jack says. He pulls on his clothes and strides out. Later, when he comes home, his face is strained.
“Don’t ask,” he says. “For now, the less you know, the better.”
“What do you need from me?”
“Go about your day as planned.”
“I’m with your father all day.”
“Good. And we’ve got that dinner in Georgetown tonight.”
“Won’t you need to be here?”
“Bobby can be me where I need him.” I realize it then. He’s already slipping Bobby into meetings with his core group of advisors from the National Security Council: the ExComm. Bobby is the only one he trusts.
In Georgetown that night, we play our way through the dinner like nothing’s amiss. As soon as we return to the White House, Jack leaves for a debrief. He comes home late, after midnight.
“What’s wrong, Jack?”
“Let’s go to sleep, kid.” He smiles at me, but the smile does not feel true.
* * *
—
The next day, a new clip in the air. I bring the children to see Jack at the Oval Office. I want to ask about Cuba, the missile sites, Soviet ships spotted offshore, what choices he’s weighing now. I know there are at least two: air strikes on the missile sites, or a naval quarantine to stop ships carrying weapons bound for Cuba. But if the United States intervenes, will Khrushchev use it as an excuse to move on his longtime threat to take Berlin? What then? Another round of sparring, or war?
We watch the children scramble over the rug. They play hide-and-seek around the desk. John does a somersault. Off-kilter. Caroline just stands there, still for a moment, watching her brother, the perfect slope of her cheek, a lovely smudge of sunlight on the bone.
What will they inherit?
I glance at Jack. His eyes are on me.
“This,” he says. “Caroline and John. They’re what I bring into that Cabinet Room, to make the right decision, a sane decision, while the whole fucking world’s on its ear.”
“Tell me what’s happening, Jack.”
“At this point, there’s nothing I can tell you.”
I look at him, wait. Then he says, “I knew it would take time to reach a solution. It never struck me there might not be one.”
* * *
—
I take the children and Joe to Glen Ora, as planned. Jack flies to Chicago, as planned. But within a day Clint informs me Jack’s returning to the White House with a head cold. A pretense. Jack calls to say he wants us home in Washington that afternoon. He wants me to host a small dinner. That evening he acts like his usual self—peppering our friends with questions about Frank Sinatra, Lord Beaverbrook, and that wild photograph of the model lying on a white bearskin, sucking her thumb. He says nothing about Cuba or Khrushchev.
Later, he tells me he’s approved a naval quarantine of ships passing into Cuba.
“A blockade?”
“A blockade’s an act of war. We can’t call it that.” The following evening, he says, he’ll make an address to the nation, announcing that the United States will not allow Soviet shipment of any offensive military equipment to Cuba. He’ll call on Khrushchev publicly to end this. He’ll cite the 1930s as a clear example that aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged, will lead to war.
People have begun to leave the city. Growing fears of a nuclear attack. It feels like everything and everyone around us is peeling away. The sense of time resting on a blade.
“It’s time for you to go, Jackie,” he says. “Move the children closer to the shelter.”
“We’re going to stay with you.”
“You’re not afraid?”
“I am afraid, because you are.” He won’t like me saying it. I say it anyway, and I see the split second of his anger because I’ve acknowledged what he doesn’t want to feel.
“If you’re afraid you should go,” he says.
“I am going to stay, Jack.”
* * *
—
From then on, there is no waking or sleeping. One day flows into the next. When he comes home for a nap or a rest, I lie down with him. When he calls, I go to his office. He’ll pull on his coat, and we’ll walk. Sometimes he talks, other times we walk in silence. One evening at dinner, he tells me that while taking a swim in the pool he kept thinking of how every decision he’d make in the next twelve hours would set in motion the following twelve, then the twelve after that, and it would just go on that way as long as the threat of the crisis continued. As he floated in the pool, he says, he remembered a painting he made years ago, in Brooklyn during the 1960 campaign. A watercolor of boats in Sheepshead Bay. He remembered the feeling he had working the pigment on the paper as he painted the wind, how he wanted to capture that wind in the landscape so it bled through the abstract shapes of boats and piers, their outlines half dissolved, because the motion of the world did not differentiate, and all we imagine to be permanent, solid, is always on the verge of being swept away.
* * *
—
John wakes up the next day with a fever. By noon, it’s over 100 degrees. While Jack is in meetings, I get John into the car and take him to the doctor.
* * *
—
Soviet tankers approach the U.S. quarantine cordon in the waters near Cuba.
A hostile letter arrives from Khrushchev, stating the U.S. blockade is a violation of terms. In the letter, he implies his ships will run it.
* * *
—
Jack comes back late—two, three in the morning.
“What happened?” I ask.
“I told our men to postpone the challenge to Khrushchev’s first ship, an oil tanker, the Bucharest. I sent word to Khrushchev suggesting we both hold up until we can talk. I’m not sure it was the right thing to do. It puts the ball in his court. Gives him time.”
“John’s fever is down,” I say. He looks startled and I realize he’d forgotten, then he looks relieved.
* * *
—
On Friday two messages come in, private Teletype direct from Khrushchev, appealing to Jack to de-escalate and offering consideration of terms.
* * *
—
Jack sends me to Glen Ora with the children. He promises to join us the following day.
Early on Sunday, the news is announced that the two nations have reached an agreement.
* * *
—
I’m waiting for him when the helicopter touches down. As we walk inside, he tells me he can only stay for a few hours. We go into the bedroom to talk. Yesterday, he says, it all nearly derailed. An American U-2 plane was shot down, the pilot killed, and McNamara contended that war was not just imminent but inevitable. Jack waited, though. No retaliation, he told McNamara. Not yet. He sent another private message back to Khrushchev, promising to withdraw missiles from Turkey if they could reach terms on Cuba, but he also said that if the compromise on Turkey leaked out, the United States would deny it. Khrushchev conceded and agreed to remove Soviet missile sites from Cuba.
“You must feel good about what you’ve done, Jack,” I say.
“Well, it’s done.”
I smile. “Give yourself half a day to enjoy it.”
“Can’t get complacent.”
Just a month ago we were looking at portraits of Lincoln, the progression of his face during his years in the White House. “Older and older, like what’s happening to me,” Jack had remarked.
“Something else,” he says to me now. “I need you at home to plan some victory dinners.”
“You mean home at the White House?”
“Yes.”
“I can do that.”
“And you should know we’ve agreed to seize Cuba and make Bobby mayor of Havana.”
I smile. I’ve bitten down one of my nails. I take a nail file from the bureau and start to work on the torn edge.
Jack
A Sunday in November, Glen Ora.
The rim of the tub digs into his shoulder, that spot where the muscle weaves against the collarbone. It’s not an unpleasant pain. Dave Powers sits on the toilet, reading off appointments for the upcoming week.
As he sinks deeper into the warm water, he thinks about his life. He’s forty-five years old. There’s less future loaded into him than past.
His wife walks in.
Her white shirt wrinkled from being tucked into her riding pants, but she’s not wearing pants, nothing but the shirt, boots, a riding whip in her hand. It’s unexpectedly violent, the whip and that glimpse of her thigh. Intentional. Her head tips toward her shoulder and she looks at Dave Powers, who is trying to keep his eyes focused on her face.
“Thank you, Dave.” She smiles, tilting her head toward the door. “Please cancel the next few hours.”
Powers gathers papers together and bumbles out, the door closing behind him, and she laughs, that quietly wicked laugh he loves.
She sits down on the edge of the tub. “How’s the bath?” She runs her fingers through the water, her fingertips brush him. “Warm enough?”
