Jackie, page 27
“The old poets say that every evening the sun falls into the sea is a reminder of that story. For them, the gods were not remote at all. They roll our lives like dice.”
He looks at me then, like we share a secret. I feel a flash of anger. There is no secret. He’s toying with my sister, and now he’s begun to tire of her, which only makes Lee cling more tightly.
* * *
—
That night in my cabin, I look through sketches I’ve made. Watercolors, rough landscapes with the edges unfinished, I’d wanted them that way—fading color toward the margin, the blue sky and a wash of sea, the scrawl of an island, the horizon—a grayish thin taut line, far off.
* * *
—
“Stay,” you said as I was leaving.
Painting on deck earlier today, I thought of you. The sun bright on my face, I could feel all the things I wanted to say before I left, things I couldn’t get out of my body to say aloud. Things about desire and voltas, what you spoke into my neck once, years ago, about everything and more. And as I felt these things, it was like I walked through a door in the air, and I was with you, and beginnings were beginnings again.
It’s been two years since I came to Greece for the first time. How different it seems to me now, not the place, but my understanding of it, my sense of what a hero is, what legends are. As Sophocles wrote—the good and the evil, the dark and the light, joy pierced with regret. It’s only there—in those intimate fault lines—that what is larger than life exists.
“Stay,” you said. Just that one word. How open it was—the look in your eyes. I’d wanted to fall into that openness. I wanted it to last. I was afraid it wouldn’t. I was afraid that, as soon as I gave myself over to it, you would leave again.
* * *
—
In three days, we go to Marrakesh, then London, then home. Before we disembark, Ari has said he wants to show me Skorpios. His island. I notice sometimes I use his first name in my head now.
* * *
—
I set the sketches down, take out a sheet of blank paper, pick up a pen. I write the date in one corner.
* * *
—
I miss you, Jack….
I think that I am lucky to miss you—
* * *
—
The next morning, stepping out of my stateroom into the hot scattered sunlight on the deck. I’m aware of him suddenly. Onassis. Standing a few yards away.
* * *
…
When I arrive home on October 17, I’ve been gone for almost three weeks. As I start down the steps of the plane, Caroline rushes up, a flash of white dress and ankle socks, John behind her, climbing one stair at a time. I wait for them at the top of the stairs. Caroline flies into my arms. I hold her tightly, the warm beating realness of her cheek against mine. John wraps himself around my leg. Then Jack is there.
“You’re back,” he says.
* * *
—
We’re together for only a night. He’s leaving for Cambridge to visit a site for the new library.
“I have a favor,” he says at breakfast. “While you were gone, Governor Connally was here.”
“I don’t like that man.”
“He reminded me I promised to visit Texas.”
“Not now, though—when they hate the test-ban treaty and the civil-rights bill.”
“He’s asked if you’d come.”
I feel something in me pause. “Texas?”
“I’m only asking you to think it over.”
“This isn’t for what’s on the table, is it? This is for the next campaign.”
“Just give it some thought, Jackie. Please.”
* * *
—
The last weekend in October, he comes to Wexford. I can feel he is restless the moment he walks through the door—some bright, sharp current running under the skin.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I’m here.”
“You seem like you’d rather be somewhere else.”
He looks at me. “I’m here.”
Vietnam, I realize over the next several hours. I start to piece it together. What’s already happened, what might happen next.
When we have a few moments alone, I ask him about it.
“It’s all going down,” he says. “That memo I agreed to in August, indicating the United States might support a coup. But I was clear there were conditions—”
The phone rings. It’s rung, it seems, every half hour since he came. Someone picks up. He leaves the room. A door slams. I hear him swear, then, “How can this house have no closets?”
When news comes from Saigon that a coup to overthrow Diem is imminent, the South Vietnamese military commanders refuse to give Jack the forty-eight hours’ notice he asks for.
“Won’t? Or can’t?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “I’ve told them I need forty-eight hours to find another way.”
* * *
—
Three in the morning on Friday the first of November, the phone rings.
“It’s begun,” he says when he hangs up. “Four minutes. That’s all the notice they gave.”
He gets out of bed, snaps the back brace into place. Before he leaves the room, he comes over and kisses me. “I love you,” he says.
Diem is dead, he learns the following day.
Jack is shaken. He had been promised Diem would be extracted peacefully, taken into exile. The military who led the coup try to claim it was a suicide, but photographs surface, showing Diem and his brother lying in blood in the back of a truck. Executed. Stabbed and shot, hands tied behind their backs.
“It shouldn’t have happened like this,” Jack says. “I should have known.”
“You couldn’t have known.”
He glances at me, his eyes so much older now.
“That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have.”
* * *
…
Franklin and Sue Roosevelt are the ones who tell me about Adlai Stevenson in Texas. They’ve come for dinner at the Residence, along with the French ambassador Hervé Alphand and his wife, Nicole. Jack is late. We’ve had two rounds of cocktails when I decide we’ll start dinner without him. As soon as we sit down, Franklin tells me it’s not a good idea—our planned trip to Dallas.
“Because of Adlai,” he says.
“They threw a placard at his head,” says Sue, “and left an awful bruise.”
“That’s not what happened,” Franklin says. “The placard missed him, but they pelted him with eggs. Called him a communist, a traitor.”
I listen, absorbing this.
“We’re not saying you shouldn’t go, Jackie,” Franklin says.
“That’s exactly what you’re saying,” says Alphand.
“Jack has to go,” I say.
“But you don’t. You could say your doctors have advised against it.”
“Hard to say that after three weeks in Greece,” I say, my eyes on the curve of the spoon skimming through the soup.
“You needed that trip.”
“I’m not sure Texas will be so understanding.”
“Well, go, then. But skip Dallas.”
Jack is coming. His steps in the hallway.
“They started without me, Mr. West?” I hear him say, teasing the chief usher as they enter the room. I don’t look up as Jack sits down. I want to put my face back together, push the fear out—he’ll know something is awry. He would be angry with them for telling me about Adlai.
* * *
—
Bill Walton phones. He tells me he went to see Elaine de Kooning in New York. Her studio was filled with images of Jack, over forty oil portraits, raw sketches and charcoal studies of his face pinned to the walls and scattered on the floor—Jack standing, seated, energy in the rough brushstrokes, like he’s about to bolt right out of his chair. She had a ladder set up to work on a massive canvas that reached to the ceiling. There was one painting, Bill says, he found particularly stunning. In an abstract sea of color and shadow, only Jack’s eyes. De Kooning told Bill that all year she’d painted Jack. Only Jack. She’d finish a portrait, then she’d have to start over. Each time she felt like she’d missed the essence and all she was able to catch was a glimpse.
* * *
—
Caroline gets out of school early. Our things packed, the children and I fly to Wexford. While John marches off in boots and helmet with his toy gun toward an army tent the agents have made for him, I take Caroline to the stables. The afternoon is starched and cool. As we ride, I feel that chill air cut against my neck. Caroline turns her pony off to work in the ring, but I urge Sardar across the open field. The horse’s pace quickens, my legs tight against the flank, a sensation I love—that sense of speed and control as the yellow-green trees flood by.
Clint is waiting at the stables. Caroline was hungry, he says; she’s gone up to the house.
“Walk with me, please, Mr. Hill.” I fold my riding gloves into my jacket pocket. I can feel the burn of the ride still, that sense of alive. “Mr. Hill, I’d like to know what you think.”
“Of course, Mrs. Kennedy.” He doesn’t look up, his face solemn, attentive. He seems almost bodiless sometimes, but he’s become a confidant. I trust him. He is always there.
“Mr. Hill, do you think the climate in Dallas is so hostile to the president that the people could mistreat us as they did Adlai?”
A pause, then, “Anything’s possible, Mrs. Kennedy. But as far as I know, there are no more threats in Dallas than in any other part of the South right now.”
He doesn’t look at me when I catch his hand. It’s brief—the touch. I hold on for only a moment, then let go.
“Thank you, Mr. Hill. You always know the right thing to say to me.”
Jack
Rockefeller’s the one he worries about. Goldwater he can beat. The Arizonian might be quick, but he’s too extreme to be a threat in the campaign. Rockefeller, though, is a centrist. That mystique of old American money. In early November, five days after the coup in Vietnam, Rockefeller announced his candidacy, slamming Jack’s “failures at home and abroad” and citing a Newsweek poll that named him “the most widely disliked Democratic president of this century among white Southerners.”
Jack called Bobby, told him to start booking strategy meetings for the reelection campaign. “Let’s hit the ground running, knock Rockefeller’s feet out from under him before he gets in this race.”
* * *
—
Saturday at the house in Virginia, Jack sits on the patio, talking with Ben Bradlee about Texas, how Connally’s at it with Senator Yarborough, how even Johnson’s lost the power to mend that feud. The mood in Dallas is ugly.
Clipper is at Jackie’s feet. Her hand strokes the dog’s head. She’d been talking to Tony, but now she’s looking out toward the land. Thinking about the horses, he’d bet.
She taps her cigarette into the ashtray. I’ll finish this one—that’s what she’s thinking—then tell them I just need to walk down, check on Sardar. I’ll slip in a quick ride.
* * *
—
He can read it in her face.
* * *
—
She turns and smiles at him then—a pure bold strength in her smile, beautiful but with a new look, removed.
She’s been different since Greece, or maybe since Patrick. Different.
She draws in on the cigarette, turns away and exhales.
“Come on,” he says, standing up. “Before you leave me for your horse, let’s take a walk.” He brushes off his pants and starts down the steps to the stone path, the green lawn flung on either side. The children fly across the yard, running to catch up. John saunters ahead. Caroline slips her hand into her father’s, little fingers weaving through his.
* * *
—
The world is a cage of light, tenuous and sheer, hills rolling away beyond.
* * *
—
Jackie’s right, he thinks. This will be a good home for a while.
* * *
—
They’ve begun to talk about “after.” After his first term ends. After he runs for another and, assuming he wins, after four more years, which will pass in a week like a dream.
He wants to write. He knows that for sure. He wants to get back to who he was before his brother Joe was killed and this work fell to him. He wants to pick up those older threads and start new. There’s so much, though, to do before then. The poverty initiative, the space program, the civil-rights bill. And, next up, the trip to Dallas to smooth the rift that bill has ostensibly caused.
That rift was always there. The country was built on that kind of hatred. Built on slave labor and the racist American violence that runs through the nation like veins. No one likes to admit that, but it’s true.
So just do it. Get through the 88th Congress. Get that bill out of the House Judiciary and passed. The tax bill, too, which is stuck in Ways and Means. Get that work done, effect what change you can in the years you have left. Get things on the rails and have some fun along the way.
Enjoy yourself. It’s later than you think.
That old Guy Lombardo song.
* * *
—
She is walking next to him, her long legs keeping stride with his, and as they cross the lawn under that free November sky, an unfamiliar feeling sweeps through him, something sweet and brutal and sad. Not pleasure. He’d recognize that. This is different, clear and strange.
Happiness. Would that be the word? For this moment, this walk, this life, the echoing sound of his footsteps on the stone under the trees, the shade and the cool autumn air. John is singing some tuneless song he’s made up, and the four of them are just walking, listening for birds, or a pattern in the rustle of leaves, or silence, Caroline clutching his hand. He can feel the moist beating warmth of her palm pressed hard to his. His back hurts, his shoulder hurts, and none of that matters; the pain seems almost irrelevant against the looming depth of this new feeling, the ache that comes with this kind of happiness.
The spaniel bolts across the path, Clipper in pursuit, and the children run after the dogs, the breeze ransacking their hair, and it strikes him that life has never felt as close as this. She is telling him quietly that she’s going to peel off soon, walk down to the stables, and, if he doesn’t mind, she’d like to take a short ride. Sure, he says, and they keep walking. The light is sharp. Blades of liquid silver on the leaves.
* * *
…
Thursday, November 21.
On his desk, a stack of newspapers and an updated schedule for the next few days: ten hours on the ground, three major cities, five motorcades.
1:30 pm Arrive San Antonio
1:40 pm Motorcade through city
2:25pm Arrive Brooks AFB to dedicate Aero Space Medical Health Center
3:30pm Depart for Houston
4:15 pm Arrive Houston
5:00 pm Arrive Rice Hotel
8:20 pm Drop by reception of Latin American Citizens in hotel
8:35 pm Depart Hotel for Coliseum dinner
He skims halfway down the page to the second day, November 22.
11:35 am Arrive Dallas Love Field
2:35 pm Depart Love Field for Austin
I’m going to need an hour rest somewhere is what he’s thinking when Evelyn Lincoln appears in the doorway.
“Ambitious schedule, Mrs. Lincoln.”
“Time to go, Mr. President.”
* * *
—
He’s told Jackie to pack her hats. Unless there’s rain, the cars will be open.
“What about a bubbletop?” Pam Turnure had asked.
“Hats,” he repeated.
The conversation ended there.
* * *
—
Two days ago, before Salinger left for Japan, Jack said to him, almost in passing, “I wish I weren’t going to Texas.”
* * *
—
Stepping out of his office into the hall, he hears the sound of shredded air as the helicopter nears.
John cries as they are leaving, clutching his father’s leg.
“I want to come,” John sobs. Jackie kneels beside him.
“Just a few days, darling,” she says. “When we get back, it will be your birthday, and we’ll have a big party.”
John reaches up then; Jack lifts him and, for a moment, buries his face into that sweet boy smell.
“Take care of him, Agent Foster,” he says.
“Yes, sir, Mr. President.”
Jack turns away. Since Patrick, it’s sandpaper on skin now—every leaving.
A heat wave is flooding Texas.
* * *
—
“You’re going to be hot,” Jack says to me on the plane.
“I’ll be fine.”
“They’re calling for rain in Dallas, so maybe we’ll bubbletop it after all.”
