Jackie, page 38
He’s distanced himself from me. Maybe Ethel, maybe the rumors about Onassis, maybe I haven’t behaved as a Kennedy widow should. He still comes to see us. He is good with the children, always. He tells them stories of Jack.
There are fewer instances when we’re alone. But in a crowded room, at a party or event, he’ll draw close to me. Almost like he can’t help it.
He’s told me he’s been tracking the breakdown of American support for Vietnam. In October, one hundred thousand protesters marched on the Pentagon. They descended on the mall, chanting songs, waving banners. They desecrated draft cards, threatened to dye the Potomac red and burn the cherry trees. By February, after the Tet Offensive and the Battle of Saigon, a Gallup poll showed that more than 50 percent of the country disapproved of Johnson’s handling of the war. Johnson was nearly beaten by Eugene McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary. He won by less than three hundred votes.
Four days later, on March 16, Bobby stands in the Caucus Room of the Old Senate Office Building to announce he is entering the race. For president.
* * *
—
At a party at Diana Vreeland’s brilliant red “garden in hell” apartment, I take Arthur Schlesinger aside.
“I know this is what everyone wants,” I say. “But do you know what I think will happen to Bobby if he wins? The same thing that happened to Jack. There’s too much hate in this country. Bobby doesn’t believe it. He isn’t cynical or fatalistic like I am. He imagines he can change their minds.”
* * *
—
When I hear the news that Martin Luther King has been shot in Memphis, I’m on my way out the door to a concert. I cancel.
Bobby calls the next day.
“It could have been you,” I tell him.
He’d been boarding a plane on his way to a campaign rally in Indianapolis when he heard. By the time they landed in Indiana, King was dead. His team told him to cancel the rally. There would be riots, they said. It was too dangerous to go out and speak to a Black crowd. Bobby went anyway. From the back of a flatbed truck, he spoke to them, about King, about nonviolence, about the need for compassion, justice, and love.
“It could have been you, Bobby,” I say again.
He comes to see me that evening, and I ask him to tell me more about that night King was shot. He tells me his team gave him a speech they’d written, but he didn’t use it. He just stood up there in the back of that truck, the crowd of faces around him, wet with tears of mourning and rage, and he told them about his own grief, the feeling he’d lived with since Jack died. It was the first time he’d spoken publicly about Jack.
“I know it’s not the same, Jackie. The world is white and what I know of suffering will never be the same as what they know, but I needed to give them something that was real, at least to me. I didn’t do it to win their vote.”
Watching his face as he tells me this, the brutal earnestness, I understand this is what makes him different. Why he’s always been different. Even from Jack.
He tells me that when he spoke to them that night, he quoted from the book I’d given him, The Greek Way. Lines from Aeschylus, but he got them wrong.
“Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair—”
“It’s despite,” I say, “not despair.”
“I know. I didn’t mean to change it. I’ve always felt it should have been despair.”
I love him very much in that moment. The way he is with me right now, the way he was that day years ago when I woke up to his face in the hospital. I’d just lost my baby, Arabella, and I woke up to the pale walls of the hospital room and his face so strangely bright, his eyes harsh and torn and blue when he told me the baby was gone, and he sat with me while I cried, holding my hand like he’d never let go. Everything was simple then between us. He was with me in that devastation, the loss of the baby, Jack’s absence. He was there, holding my anger and my sorrow. It was uncomplicated, pure. Everyone knew their place, their role.
“Coretta Scott King reached out,” he says now. I feel my breath tighten. I know what’s coming. “They’re asking if you and I will attend the funeral.”
“What did you say?”
“That it might be hard for you.”
“Yes.”
“Will you go?” he says.
“I don’t want to.”
“That’s what I thought.”
This has drawn us together. Of course. The thought bitter. It would have to be this kind of price. I’ll go with him to Atlanta, but I’m afraid some terrible thing will happen.
“King was a tricky man,” I say.
“He fought for what was right.”
“You told me he was drunk the day of Jack’s funeral—”
“Hoover fed that to us. We’ve all learned since then, Hoover had his reasons.”
I don’t answer.
“So you’ll go,” he says, “for King’s widow’s sake?”
“And yours.”
* * *
…
I do not belong here.
* * *
—
The words rise in my mind as we walk through the narrow front entrance of the Ebenezer Baptist Church. The heat is stifling that April day in Atlanta. Two hundred thousand people have streamed into the city.
I clutch Bobby’s hand. He drives a path through the crowd. We find space in a pew. I barely hear the words. Even King’s voice playing over the loudspeaker—the last message he gave—is distorted, like it’s coming across a great distance. I can’t stop looking at the faces—devastated, oddly silent, no shock, just an awful resignation. They’ve seen this too many times before. This kind of violence has already taken husbands, fathers, sons.
When the service ends, I grip Bobby’s hand again, and we pass back through the sea of bodies toward the shaved rectangle of light that marks the exit. We’re adrift, just the two of us again, our lives and actions untethered from everyone else.
“People will be outraged for a while,” I say on the plane heading home. “They’ll feel sad, and guilty, but they hate feeling that way. It won’t last. Then they’ll turn.”
I know how harsh it sounds, but I can’t get out from under it.
“I don’t believe that,” Bobby says.
“I know.”
* * *
…
I do not belong here.
* * *
—
Those same words rising in me again, days later in Hyannis Port, as a stream of young men arrive in their dark-blue suits, their light-gray suits, loosening their ties. Some I know. Others seem familiar. I’ve seen these young men, or men like them, a thousand times before—fresh-faced aides pulling into the drive, stepping out of cars, hauling weekend bags to rooms upstairs, reappearing in loafers, polos, khaki shorts, golf sweaters. There’s iced tea, lemonade, sometimes an early daiquiri. There are cigarettes and ashtrays, and they sit around the room and talk about the challenges and opportunities created by King’s death, what needs to be considered, what can be capitalized on, shaped into rhetoric, and no matter how moral the cause is, the parsing of it into strategy feels predatory.
I sit in my corner and listen. Bobby asked me to come, so I’m here. When he speaks, his eyes blaze, more impassioned than the others. This is, after all, what drives him, this desire to set the world on a better, more just course, to lift those who’ve been pushed down, to give them voice in the world. This is what makes him more. This is what I believe in and will always love.
Sandwiches and more drinks are brought in. The talk shifts. A lightness restored to the room. So easy it makes my skin crawl.
I see it then—what I’ve known for too long. This is what those Black men and women in the Baptist Church will never have: the choice to turn away.
I stand up. Bobby glances at me. He must see something new on my face, because he stops talking, he’s on his feet, heading toward me as I head for the door.
“Jackie,” he says; he is close to me, that sweet, crushed hunger in his voice. I avert my eyes from him toward a photograph of Jack on the console, one I have not been able to look at head-on for over four years. I look at it squarely now as I walk out of that room. It is all distilled in a moment—intimate and beloved—a different time, a different life.
When I see Onassis again, I understand that he has simply been there. Waiting. The sense of him emerging. He’s been a shadow in my life—an outline, mythical.
I remember something Lee said once. “For Ari, everything is a chess game. His patience is enduring.”
He’s offered his plane to fly me and the children to Palm Beach for Easter. I wonder how he knew our plans. Does it matter? He’s on his way to meet his daughter in Nassau. He talks to the children as the plane heads south. John, seven now, loves anything in flight. Ari brings him up to the cockpit to sit with the captain and work the controls.
Ari comes to sit with me. “How is Bobby?” he asks.
“Running for president. I don’t see him often.”
“He’ll win, I think.”
“If that’s what he wants, I want that for him.”
“So Bobby will win. And then what?”
* * *
—
There are gifts. He calls them little nothings. “Just trinkets that made me think of you,” he says. A diamond-and-ruby bracelet, a sapphire pin, a string of pearls.
* * *
—
In May, he invites me for a short cruise through the Virgin Islands.
Bobby has won Indiana and Nebraska, but the numbers aren’t conclusive enough to throw McCarthy out of the race. Bobby and a raft of other Kennedys fly to campaign for Oregon and California. I don’t go with them. Instead, I fly to St. Thomas and the Christina. After dinner, we sit on deck, our voices mixing with the smells and sounds of the dark, the play of the waves, the distant chain of lights that mark the islands.
“It’s like cruising through stars,” I say.
Ari laughs. “But not as beautiful as Greece.”
He’s smoking one of his Montecristo cigars. The gangster-style glasses that storm his face rest on the table between us.
“So when are you coming back to my island?” he asks.
“After the election.”
A momentary blind comes over his eyes. Then he smiles, and that hardness just as suddenly is gone.
* * *
—
The day I fly home to New York, Bobby loses the Oregon primary. I call him.
“If I lose California,” he says, “I’m out.”
“That’s silly. You’re not close to out.”
“I’m out if I don’t win California.”
“It’ll work,” I say. “I didn’t want you to do this, but I can see now it’s the right thing.”
“I don’t trust Onassis,” he says abruptly.
“He’s not a bad man, Bobby.”
“Tell that to the European press.”
“You’re saying I should make my decisions according to the press?”
“I’m saying Greece, since the coup, is a military dictatorship and Onassis has no convictions.”
“His convictions may not be political. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist.”
“He’s a danger, Jackie.”
The word stops me for a moment. Then I say, “You don’t mean he’s a danger to me, do you, Bobby?”
“That is what I mean.”
“You mean he’s a danger for you.”
“No,” he says. “It’s more than that.” But I struck a nerve. I can hear it in his voice. Does he really believe he’s protecting me? That he still needs to? I feel a rush of tenderness toward him, then it tightens.
* * *
…
He wins California. I stay up late on the night of June 4 to watch the final results come in. Then I go to bed. I’m tired, and he won’t give his speech until midnight West Coast time.
* * *
—
When the phone rings, I’m sure it’s him. The sound is sudden. I feel across the nightstand for the phone, lift the receiver.
“Hello,” I say.
“How’s Bobby?” a voice asks.
“Stas, is that you?”
“How is he?”
“He won!”
Good Lord, it’s four in the morning—couldn’t he have just flipped on the TV?
“No, I mean how is he?”
“He won California, Stas. Isn’t it wonderful?”
I’m still half asleep, shaken by the jolt of the ringing phone. I’m not quite caught up. Loud noises still tear into me. Stas knows this, and I wonder again why he’s calling when he could have just switched on the TV.
I can feel the silence on the line. Like something has been disconnected. The receiver is cool in my hand, the mouthpiece against my cheek. I watch the city lights play down the edge of the curtain. Like mercury falling. I wish I’d turned on the lamp before picking up. I wish there was no sign of that beautiful dancing light—its promise and its heart.
* * *
—
Don’t say anything. Don’t ask. Keep holding the receiver and the silence.
* * *
—
“Stas,” I say finally.
He tells me then.
* * *
…
Later, I’ll piece the details together—how that night, walking through the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel, Bobby was shot, once in the head, twice in the back; he just kind of slipped to the floor, the ground pulled out underneath him. Shouts, screaming, cries. Blood pooled from his head. Ethel fought through the crowd to reach him and, when she did, she pushed them all back to give him space and air.
Learning this particular detail, I do not want to imagine Ethel’s face.
* * *
—
I fly to L.A.
Chuck Spalding and Richard Goodwin meet me at the airport.
“I want it straight,” I say.
* * *
—
Bobby is in a tangle of medical equipment. Ethel lies over the bed, crying, her face across his legs. She is pregnant with their eleventh child. Teddy prays by the bed, on his knees. Other faces stand at the edges, ravaged. The same faces. It’s too familiar. Crushing, airless, the bright hospital light. I just want to stop, to drop to my knees next to Teddy, not to pray, just to feel my knees against that implacable linoleum floor, like the sense of hardness meeting hardness might be enough to push the dark down.
* * *
—
I stay for a while in the room, then step out into the corridor.
* * *
—
Richard Goodwin tells me that he and Ted Sorensen had been upstairs in the suite, watching the speech on TV. They turned it off and were about to head down to meet Bobby when they heard screaming from the hall, the sound of running. They turned the TV back on and watched it unfold on the screen.
* * *
—
I want to hear it, detail by detail, from every point of view. I want to feel it, know it, as if I’m waking up. I want to be there in the horrible glare. I want the full weight of it to cut me loose. The grief is immeasurable. A vastness I’ll never come to terms with or have the words to explain. I stand in the corridor outside the room where Bobby lies, hooked to machines that keep his chest rising and falling, his heart beating, though his brain is gone. No doctor will dare give the word to let him go. Ethel is stretched over him, Teddy still on his knees, with his bowed head and prayers.
* * *
—
At one point during the course of that day that goes on forever, Ethel glances at me across Bobby’s body that is no longer Bobby, and there’s an expression on her face—some question mixed in with the grief—that until the end of my life I will not know how to interpret. Then she stands up, touches Teddy on the shoulder, and draws him out of the room. For ten minutes, I am alone with him.
* * *
—
Then it’s midnight again, then half past, then one. His chest still moving up and down, machines whirring away. We are gathered around him—in our places, a tableau.
* * *
—
It’s time. No one says it. We all know. There’s a pressure, faint, like heat on my skin. Ethel is looking at me. I meet her eyes. It’s time. She nods, turning away, that impossible mix of agony and sorrow in her face as it caves.
* * *
—
1:44 a.m.
* * *
—
You have been the last dream of my soul.
* * *
—
Machines stop, his chest falls,
And it is done.
Mind, words, body, knowledge, dream.
* * *
—
Done.
* * *
—
When he died, you understand, that was the end, your beloved brother’s death the final stroke of yours. There was no incentive then. No legacy. No passing of the torch. All we sacrificed and fought for and believed in. What was left of my heart broke and that was it. We stayed there gathered around his bed. It was like living your death all over again, and I was one of them and at the same time already fading from their view, passing out of their reach, alone. I saw the fabric of it all—how carefully we’d tried to build it, tried to keep it, and now the dissolution—Ethel with her lovely faithful head bowed, the rest of them, their eyes cast down, tears paving their faces, and I was there and not there, I did not cry, not then, and they did not notice. We all just stood there, without seeing. Watching our lives turn into history.
