Jackie, page 25
“Patrick fought,” Jack keeps telling me. Again and again, he tells me this—how tiny Patrick was, how brave. At Children’s, he’d started to improve, his breathing had stabilized, but then he went into a sudden downward spiral, and they put his tiny body in a hyperbaric chamber and tried to flood oxygen into his lungs. Jack could do nothing. He could only sit there in the corridor on a wooden chair and wait. There was a round window in the chamber, a porthole window, through which he could see our baby. How he fought. How clear it was that he wanted to live, to breathe. And when he began to die, they brought Patrick out to him, and Jack sat on that wooden chair and held him as he fought right to the end.
Jack tells me this over and over; he goes back to those hours, that moment, when he held our baby in his arms and his heart broke. He looks down at his hands as he reaches the end, like he still can’t believe how his hands could have let that slight life go.
* * *
—
Night again. He’s gone. They need him in Washington, and he’s flown back. He has meetings with the Senate about the test-ban treaty vote. Within a few days, he’s promised, he’ll return. I can’t sleep. The air in the room unsettled. Nurses come and go. I ask them to leave me alone.
I want to stanch it, that grief, a hard, fast, raging thing forcing a channel through in its own most terrible way.
* * *
—
Down there in the ground, alone. He is too small to be down there alone, too small to have slipped, so easily, through some slight crack from our world into that dark other.
* * *
—
Jack flies back to Hyannis on Wednesday to bring me to our house on Squaw Island. As we walk out of the hospital and down the front steps, he grips my hand. He opens the door of the car and helps me in.
We spend hours together, lying on the bed, without exchanging a word. His arms wrap around me, my face against his chest. My tears soak his shirt and his soak my hair, that wet leaking in to soften the leftover ice between us. I feel it happen. Through those long silent hours of August, it hollows us, changing the ways we fit into each other—hands, bodies, eyes—even as the rest of the world starts up again.
When he is in Hyannis Port, he is with me almost constantly. When he has to fly down to Washington, he returns within days. So much is the same as it’s always been. The children still come running at the sound of the helicopter in its descent. When it lands and he climbs out, he sweeps John and Caroline up in a hug. Then he comes to find me. That is the difference. Not sometimes anymore, but always. And if I’m not right there with the others, he won’t get into the golf cart and drive into town with the children; he’ll come to find me first. He’ll take me in his arms and hold me, the holding so tight, his mouth in my hair, and I will say to him, “Bring them into town now, Jack, they’ve been waiting all day. Take them for an ice cream. Go now, before the store closes.”
“I needed to see you,” he’ll say.
It feels unfamiliar—that he’ll use that word often now—need.
He comes every weekend. If he can, he’ll fly up midweek as well, something he’s never done before. I watch him nap in the afternoons. I see the subtle tremble on his face, like light circulating in water, the softness and uncertainty. It feels new, vulnerable, open. I want to trust that openness. I can’t quite. I keep feeling I’ll go to reach for him and he’ll do that quick cold thing and shift away. I keep waiting for it to happen, to mark it to tell myself, See, there it is again, the heartbreaking same old routine. I keep waiting for that to come, but it doesn’t, as if this dark singular loss, the baby he held as it died, the horror of being the one who bore witness, who lived it, has thawed something in him all the way through.
One weekend he comes up a day early and brings a cocker spaniel puppy with a gold-shamrock-studded collar; her name is Shannon.
I smile. “Because we aren’t already swimming in dogs?”
We’re alone in the house. I ask about his week, just an ordinary conversation, the kind we’ve had a thousand times. He says something about being at the end of his rope with Rusk.
“Who would you replace him with?”
“Bundy. Or McNamara. The press has already dubbed the Pentagon as McNamara’s, why not bring him closer in.”
I nod.
“And Johnson wants more of a role,” he says.
“That could be a good thing.”
He talks about an emerging crisis in Vietnam. “We don’t take the time to learn how they see us.” He tells me about the March on Washington for Jobs, his concerns about violence. “Not dissimilar,” he adds, “when the face of racism in the South is something we, in the North, can’t fathom because we don’t take the time to learn.”
“Maybe we don’t want to,” I say. He starts to answer, then doesn’t. I’ll bring it up again down the road. I know he suggested to Bobby they try to shut the march down, and Bobby told him that you can’t shut this kind of thing down. He’s looking at me now, not saying anything. It feels startling—that foreign and intimate sense of him fully present, with me, his mind nowhere else, not moving on to some next thing, an openness in his face like he’s saying he has begun to realize these things will work out. One way or another, they’ll work out.
That slight life. Patrick, the curious mixture of the two of us—his life a drop of water or a falling star, dissolving into dark.
The phone rings. He takes the call. He’s silent for the most part, listening to someone on the other end who is reading a memo draft. From time to time he interjects, questioning a phrase. It’s about Vietnam, a response to rumors of a coup led by South Vietnamese Army generals against the autocratic ruler, Ngo Dinh Diem. Diem, I know, is considered a defense against the Vietcong and communism. Ostensibly an American ally, he’s also fickle, obdurate, cruel. Jack has told me Diem can’t be trusted.
“Choose between two evils,” he says now into the phone. “What choice do we have?” He says something about how he’ll support a memo as long as McNamara and Rusk sign off.
Last week, there was a story in the papers about a Buddhist monk who soaked himself with gasoline, struck a match, and burned to death in a Saigon Public Square.
I slip out of the room and go to find the children. They’re in the kitchen eating diced apples they picked earlier that day.
* * *
…
I write to Bill Walton.
Dear Baron…
I write to him about the things I am looking forward to this fall—our work together on Lafayette Square, the renovation of Blair House, plans for a state dinner for the king of Afghanistan. I tell him it seems odd to look forward to anything after what Jack and I just went through.
I don’t write, I miss Patrick. He was less than two days old. I never held him. I think about that and try not to. I have been so very sad.
I ask Bill to visit the studio of that artist in New York, Elaine de Kooning, who is painting Jack. I’m curious to know what she’s done with him so far. Then I ask for his advice about the White House guard boxes. I tell him I was thinking they should be painted dark green but I’m afraid they’ll look too much like outhouses. I write that knowing it will make him laugh. I set down the pen. There’s a cable on the desk that arrived yesterday. A message from Lee with an invitation from Aristotle Onassis for a cruise in the Aegean. I mentioned it to Jack. He shook his head. “That man’s a pirate.”
* * *
—
On Labor Day weekend, Jack tells me he’s planning a trip to Cambridge in October to look at a site for the presidential library.
“When this is all over,” he says, “I’ll have an office there.”
“When what is all over?”
“This public life.”
I tell him then I’d like to go to Greece with Lee.
“It would be good for me to see her and have some time away.”
“Your sister is sleeping with the biggest crook in Europe,” he says. “Onassis.”
We’re outside in the shade of the flagstone patio. The light has come to the edge where I sit. It skirts my bare feet. My shoes are set next to John’s little red sneakers.
“You have so much to do,” I say. “You’ll barely miss me.”
“That’s not true.”
* * *
…
Almost evening, on Thursday, September 12, Jack arrives in Newport for our anniversary. The helicopter lands at dusk on the lawn at Hammersmith Farm. I step toward him, and his arms slip around me. He holds me for a long moment.
* * *
—
There are twelve of us for dinner that night, including Ben and Tony Bradlee, Claiborne and Nuala Pell, my mother, Hughdie, my stepbrother Yusha. Everyone gathers in the hall downstairs.
“Where’s Jackie?” I hear Jack say through the door to the terrace. “Yusha, where’d she go?”
“I think just outside.”
Jack comes through the door as I turn. “There you are,” he says; he takes my hand and we walk back in. The others have begun to flow into the Deck Room and to the table set near the tall windows that catch the shine of plates and bowls, the unstable reflections of wineglasses. Those windows give way to the dark plunge of lawn into the sea and the deep lasting blue of the twilight over Narragansett Bay.
We exchange gifts. I give Jack a set of brass blazer buttons with the Irish Brigade insignia, a scrapbook of the Rose Garden, and a St. Christopher medal to replace the one he tucked in with Patrick. He gives me a slim gold ring with ten emerald chips, each stone marking a year of our marriage. “An eternity ring,” he says, almost in passing.
“And one other thing,” he says. On the carved circular table, he’s set out an assortment of unwrapped gifts from the Klejman Gallery in New York.
“All of these, Jack?”
“No, you have to choose.”
I smile. “But it’s a gift. Shouldn’t you be the one to choose?”
“You have to pick the one you want.”
Etruscan sculptures, drawings by Fragonard and Degas, antique bracelets.
“How can I possibly choose?”
“Only one.”
“But who will you give the others to?”
The room laughs. He is standing across the table from me, waiting, and I realize he’s already chosen. Without saying it, among these objects, there’s one he wants me to pick. I choose two. A drawing and an Alexandrian gold serpent bracelet. A simple bracelet, exquisite. I can tell by a faint light in his eyes it’s the one. I slip it on my wrist.
My mother touches my elbow. Dinner is ready, and do I want to call everyone in?
There are toasts that night, one from Yusha, who strikes a spoon lightly on his glass. He stands and recalls the evening years ago when he first met Jack at Merrywood. Yusha tells the story of how I instructed him ahead of time to make especially fine daiquiris and to not argue about Democrat vs. Republican or Harvard vs. Yale. Jack doesn’t glance at me. He is listening to Yusha. But I keep feeling he will look my way to let me know he too remembers that time in our life—that evening of the Dancing Class when we talked about fingernails soaked green from the darkroom solvents and I asked him to help button my gloves. I wonder if he remembers. His gaze is fixed on Yusha, who is still speaking. Jack’s face looks older, fragile somehow, a faint tension along the jaw, something I haven’t noticed for a while. I realize then that he’s going out of his way not to look at me, so I stare at him until he does. It’s quick, his glance, but his eyes are just so soft before he looks away again. I’m aware of the vaulted shape of the room, a room I’ve sat in a thousand nights before, for dinner parties like this one, the dark beams and cathedral-like pitch of the ceiling that seems all at once steep, like we are falling through a rush of time and space, and we are not significant—not one of the twelve of us sitting around this beautifully arrayed table with its candlelight, silver, and china, our unfinished meal, crumbs scattered, knives and forks set against the plates to signal completion. There’s a loose shadowed imprint of water on the tablecloth where the pitcher was sweating, and through the windows there is night now, and I’m unable to distinguish the shapes demarcating sea from land from sky. I feel a chill, like the temperature has dropped, a window open somewhere in the house that pulls the damp night in.
“Mr. President,” Yusha says, raising his glass. “I want to congratulate you. You’ve been a very good president. I’m glad you had your wedding here in Newport. I’m glad you’re celebrating your wedding anniversary here tonight with Jackie. And I must remind you: If you hadn’t gotten engaged to my stepsister, neither one of you would be in the White House, and I wouldn’t have had a chance to stay in the White House. So I have to thank you for that.”
Jack laughs and raises his glass.
* * *
—
The sun is cool and bright for the next few days, the sky sharp. We go to Mass on Sunday at St. Mary’s Church, where we were married ten years before. There’s a crowd on Spring Street as we leave. Jack waves to them, that shining smile, then strides to the convertible and takes the wheel. We drive off. He slows at a corner where a small group of nuns stand.
He calls out to greet them.
“Jackie here always wanted to be a nun,” he says. “She went to a convent school and planned to take the orders.”
The sisters laugh, we laugh with them, and it all feels so ordinary—human and hallowed and bright, mid-September sunshine bouncing off the curb, and the nuns laughing, and Jack with his collar loose, his hand on the leather-wrapped wheel while passersby dressed in Sunday clothes stroll on the sidewalk, peering into closed shop windows.
“I like Newport,” he says that afternoon when we’re at the beach with the children. Running back and forth in the shallows, they jump the little waves. “I like how we can drive around, come to this beach and swim, and even if people notice, they don’t seem to care. Maybe we’ll spend next summer here.”
A seagull passes overhead, its shadow across the sand.
“You’re leaving tonight,” I say.
“I’ll be back next weekend.”
I nod.
“Golf later this afternoon?” he says.
I smile. “Sure.”
“Good for my back.”
“That isn’t true.”
“It loosens it up.”
“Until it doesn’t.”
“Golf’s better than football.”
“Yes, Jack, I’ll give you that.”
John’s toy plane and sneakers are at the edge of the blanket. He’s in the shallows up to his knees, while Caroline splashes in the bigger waves out toward the break.
“They want to pick more tomatoes when we go back to the house,” I say.
“You said they picked them all yesterday.”
“John thinks more have grown overnight.”
He tells me about a speech he’s been asked to give in October in memory of Robert Frost. He asks what I think he should focus on.
“The artist in society,” I say. “The artist is the one who has a lover’s quarrel with the world—talk about how important it is to say what you believe, then let the chips fall.”
“Easier said for the artist than the politician.”
“Maybe,” I say.
“And I’ve got the UN General Assembly next week. I’m going to propose a joint expedition to the moon.”
“Joint?”
“United States and Russia. Countries should work together in the conquest of space.”
“Because of the exorbitant cost?”
“That, and why not?”
“Khrushchev’s too wary.”
“So be it,” Jack says. “We’re moving ahead. I’ll put the offer on the table.”
I smile and pick up a piece of shell. “I like that, Jack.”
“I told Sorensen I want that UN speech to signal a new approach to the Cold War. I want to talk about how peace isn’t just an event. It’s not something you achieve, then it’s done. You have to work at it—day in, day out.”
“Like a marriage.” The words are out before I can call them back. He laughs, and I expect him to say something then, but he doesn’t, and silence falls again between us.
Jack
She hasn’t turned to look at him again. She’s looking away, as if focused on something else, her gaze averted, deliberate, toward the distance past his shoulder. Without shifting her eyes, she says:
“Why are you looking at me like that, Jack?”
He doesn’t answer. He is remembering that other question she asked years ago, that day in the water the summer before they were married when they were here, on this same beach, wading in.
“Do you love me, Jack?” she’d asked.
* * *
—
How would he answer that now? Of course he loves her. She’s his wife. He loves her beauty, her intelligence and charm, her passion for language and art. Her style and her grace. He loves the way she is beloved. But even as he runs down this list in his head, he understands he’s running down a list of attributes that add to her value, and part of him wants to explain he’s never really had a chance to fall in love with her, in his own way, on his own terms. Everything’s moved so fast. There’s always something he’s already late for, some fire he has to put out, somewhere else he has to be.
Faint lines at the corners of her eyes. He sees them now, the light on a slant. She is here. Flesh, bone, eyes. And in her face he can see traces of the girl she was ten years ago and traces of the older woman she’ll become; he can see these different moments of her life, past, future, woven through the living incandescence of her face, turned slightly away from him.
