Their Shadows Deep: A Novel, page 27
“He wins me Texas, I’ll bake him a cake.”
The wind blew off the bay. Caitlin hugged herself against the cold. “Driving up, I heard on the radio you had a big lead.”
Shivering, Jack stuck his hands in the pockets of his topcoat. “The Northeast returns. The lead’s smaller now. I was glad to get out of Bobby’s house. They’re all so goddamn nervous.”
“Not you?”
Jack laughed bitterly. “Haven’t you heard? I’m a war hero. Getting nervous is bad for my image.”
Caitlin gave the envelope to him. “This would be worse.”
Jack stared at the dock of the yacht club. The planks were silver in the moonlit bay. “My brother Joe and I used to sail out there. Kick too. I remember feeling like those summer days would last forever. Joe’s been dead sixteen years, Kick for twelve, and I keep wondering—where did those summers go?” The wind ruffled his hair, making him seem so young. Jack held up the envelope. “Caitlin, I can’t tell you how relieved I am Gabe didn’t die for this. I hate that I got him involved with the CIA. I didn’t recruit him. We were talking about the agency, and he asked me if I could help him get a job.”
“I don’t blame you. I couldn’t talk Gabe out of working there.”
“But you’re still angry at me.”
“Disappointed. I like your wife. She’s brave. Her miscarriage, the stillbirth, the campaign and being pregnant, you being gone so much—it has to be hard for her. And I worry about you.”
Jack eyed the sand, digging up a seashell with the toe of his shoe. Caitlin was angered by his impervious calm, as though his balls routinely getting the better of his brain was in the natural order of things. “Maybe the reporters hold back,” she said. “But what if a biographer writes about it? Or one of the women? Like Warren Harding’s mistress.”
Jack grinned. “Nan Britton. I read it. They used to get together in a White House closet.”
“It’s nothing to grin about. If you wind up in a memoir like that, I’ll bet your daughter will have some questions for you. Won’t that be fun?”
As intended, mentioning Caroline got his attention. He looked at her, the lines deepening at the corners of his eyes.
“Why, Jack?”
He shrugged. “I can’t explain it.”
“Try.”
So softly it was difficult to hear him over the wind, he replied, “I’m hungry all the time. And I can’t—I can’t get full.”
“I like you better like this.”
“Sad?”
“Honest,” Caitlin said.
Jack was gazing at the dock again. “Honest doesn’t always get the job done, does it?”
Caitlin didn’t answer. Jack looked at her.
“It doesn’t,” she said.
Jack smiled at her. “On a lighter note, J. Edgar Hoover called to tell me what he knew about Reed Howland and Été. He asked me how I knew her, and I told him we’d become friendly years ago when I was in Saigon.”
“Sounds like he was blackmailing you.”
“Edgar wants to keep his job. I’ll keep him for as long as I can stand him.”
Jack handed Caitlin a laminated card. “Win or lose, there’s going to be a press conference at the armory. Here’s a pass. If I lose, I’m still a senator, and if you want a job in Washington—”
“I had an offer to be the assistant arts editor at the Newark Evening News. I’m going to take it.”
“That’s wonderful. Good luck with it.” Jack started to go, then pivoted back toward her. “Caitlin, losing someone you love doesn’t mean your life is over.”
“It just feels like it.”
Jack was silent, then said, “I suppose it does, but here’s what I know. The dead love you forever.” He raised the envelope. “Thanks for this.”
Caitlin knew she should be polite. She chose honesty instead. “I did it for Gabe.”
Jack glanced out to where he used to sail with his brother and sister. “I know that. And like you, I wish Gabe was here.”
Caitlin watched him walk toward the yacht club until she realized he was gone and she had been staring at the darkness.
Chapter 74
At 4:00 a.m., Jack crawled under the covers with the election in doubt. Five hours later, as he sat on the bed in his pajamas, his speechwriter and press secretary stopped in to tell him he had unofficially racked up 285 votes in the Electoral College, making him president-elect. After his aides departed, Jack went into the bathroom to shave. As he flicked at his soapy cheek with a straight razor, it struck him as vaguely unreal that he was about to line up behind George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.
At breakfast, he felt more presidential. Along with his gray suit, he was wearing the colors of the flag—a white shirt and a blue tie with red polka dots. And Caroline called him Mr. President.
As he ate his bacon and eggs, Jackie, eight months pregnant, shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “Jack, when is the press conference?”
The sun shone through the window behind her, and her dark hair and pale complexion glowed. “Not till Nixon concedes. ”
Jackie gazed at the lace tablecloth, and Jack marveled at her ability to vanish before his eyes, as if she could summon the fog from the sea and surround herself in mist. That would have to stop now. It was lousy politics for a First Lady to disappear. Especially one so young and pretty and clever and stylish.
Out in the brisk salt air, Jack hoisted Caroline onto his back and gave her a piggyback ride across the lawn, pain shooting up his spine like fireworks.
“Daddy, Mommy says we have to move. I don’t want to.”
“Why, Buttons?”
“Because I’ll miss you.”
“I’m going too. I wouldn’t leave you.”
“You won’t?”
“Never,” he said.
By noon, Jack was sitting in Bobby’s living room with his brother, his sister-in-law Ethel, and several aides, their eyes glued to the television set.
“What the fuck is this?” Jack asked.
“Merv Griffin hosting a game show,” Bobby said. “Play Your Hunch.”
Jack grinned, but his voice had a sarcastic edge. “You’re a fan?”
Before Bobby could reply, Merv Griffin was replaced on the TV by Nixon’s press secretary reading a congratulatory telegram from the vice president to the senator. As the results flashed on-screen, Jack remembered when he and Dick had been friends, and he imagined how rotten he must feel losing such a close one.
Bobby said, “Let’s go, Jack. We’re taking a family picture at Dad’s.”
With his palms on the arms of the chair, Jack pushed himself to his feet, his back still aching. “I’ll meet you.”
He returned to his house, opened a door in the kitchen, flipped a light switch, and descended the stairs into the cellar. Across from the furnace was a floor safe. It had belonged to the previous owner. Jack hadn’t used it until last night. He spun the combination knob and removed the envelope. Cuba had once been his playground. As president, that island would be a colossal pain in the ass unless the CIA got rid of Castro before Inauguration Day.
Jack brought the envelope outside, waving off the Secret Service agents shadowing him and going into his side yard, where a gardener had been burning leaves in a row of smoldering barrels. Jack was ashamed Caitlin had seen him in this carnal circus act, and he tossed the envelope into one of the smoking barrels, then picked up a can of Kingsford charcoal lighter fluid from the ground and squirted the fluid into the smoke. An orange blaze flared up. He closed his eyes. For Jack, the fragrance of burning leaves was as joyful a part of autumn as football. Yet the season hollowed him out. He hated leaving the ocean to go away to school, and he hated his goodbyes with Kick.
Jack remembered the fall he was sixteen and Kick was thirteen. His sister was miserable because she was being shipped off to the Noroton Convent in Connecticut to receive a religious and secular education.
Kick said, “Mother won’t be happy until I’m a nun.”
They were walking home from downtown Hyannis. Jack had taken her for an ice cream soda at Megathlin’s Drug Store, but his sister had just poked the scoop of vanilla with her spoon.
“Kick, I’ll be at Choate, and I can visit you.”
“If I’m a nun, I can still jitterbug at nightclubs, can’t I?”
“Let’s ask Mother.”
Kick giggled and took his arm. “Brother, I love you.”
Jack opened his eyes and saw the flames erasing the record of his Cuban debauchery.
“I love you too, Kick.”
President-elect. That’s impressive. I remember when you had pimples.
“Kick, I should’ve died so many times. When I was a kid. In the South Pacific. On a trip to Europe and the Far East. After my back surgery. Is this why God let me live? To be president?”
How do I know? God has no time for the dead. He can barely keep up with the living.
“Once I’m in the White House, we can’t talk. Everybody will say I’m losing my mind.”
Oh, stop. People know the Irish talk to ghosts, and they voted for you anyway.
Jack laughed, and the wind blew the smoke from the fire past him.
At his parents’ house, his brother Teddy was standing on the porch and called down to him, “We’re all here except Jackie. She went for a walk on the beach.”
Jack negotiated his way down the hill through the dune grass toward the choppy gray sound. Jackie was coming toward him on the sand, her pregnancy swelling her tan raincoat. Dear God, let this baby live, please.
When his wife reached him, she said, “I knew you’d win, Bunny.”
He kissed her cheek.
“Jack, it’s going to be different now.”
He smiled. “Yes, we’ll live in a bigger house.”
Her expression was flat, and Jack realized his wife was in no mood for jokes.
She said, “There will be so many people around us. Your staff, the Secret Service, reporters. People will be watching us.”
“That’s the job, Jackie.”
“Yes, so we will have to be different—with each other.”
His wife was staring at him. Jack knew what she wanted to hear, but he doubted it was possible. He’d try, though. He could do that. “It will be different.”
The wind whipped her hair across her face.
He said, “I promise. It will.”
She rewarded his promise with a kiss on his lips. Jack took her hand, and together they went up through the dune grass, the gulls crying as they wheeled overhead.
Chapter 75
Under a cinderblock sky, the motorcade drove down South Street. Men and women in their Sunday best stood five deep along the route, pressing forward to get a closer look while state troopers spread their arms to keep them out of the road. The lead car was a white Lincoln. Jack was in the front seat. Caitlin saw him through the windshield. She was standing near a cluster of campaign workers wearing Kennedy for President buttons and waiting by the doors of the redbrick armory.
When the Lincoln stopped, Jack got out. No hat, no topcoat, just a gray suit and that winning smile. Next to him, a Secret Service agent, checking for threats, looked up at the flat roof of the armory, where photographers were yelling for the president-elect to hold still so they could take his picture. Jackie emerged from the car, her pregnancy partially hidden by a purple double-breasted coat, and followed her husband through an excited gauntlet of well-wishers. Caitlin couldn’t tell if Jack spotted her through the crowd. He did nod in her direction, but he was nodding at everyone. Jackie saw her, though. At the entrance, Jackie turned to Caitlin. Rolling her eyes like a teenager impatient with the tedious rituals of adults, and referring to their tipsy conversation at the Carlyle, she said “Got any champagne?” and then disappeared into the armory.
Caitlin was reluctant to go in. She had stayed up late watching the returns and dozed on and off until she gave up on sleep and showered and dressed and bought the Boston Globe in the lobby and walked to the Mayflower Restaurant in Hyannis. She had coffee and cinnamon toast and read the paper. Evidently, Julian retained his clout in New Jersey. Jack had lost fourteen of twenty-one counties but narrowly carried the state. After breakfast, Caitlin meant to drive to New York. Instead, she wandered over to the armory, telling herself she was curious. That wasn’t the whole truth. Caitlin was seeking a finale, a demarcation line separating yesterday from today, even though she knew that no such line existed. And this knowledge, that she was pursuing an illusion, explained her reluctance. Caitlin had helped Jack and found Gabe’s killer, and her payoff was a guilty conscience and nightmares about shooting Reed. She should pack up and leave. But Caitlin was cold from standing outside, and illusions, after all, were not so easy to renounce.
Inside the armory, reporters, cameramen, and supporters were applauding as Jack wended his way through the audience and stepped onto the rostrum to give his speech. His parents and brothers and sisters sat behind him. Caitlin recognized the actor Peter Lawford. He was married to one of Jack’s sisters. She remembered seeing Lawford with Frank Sinatra and Steve McQueen in that war movie Gabe liked, Never So Few. They had seen it in Times Square. Caitlin couldn’t recall the theater. Either the Paramount or the Rialto. It made her sad she couldn’t remember, another piece of her life with Gabe slipping away.
Jack stood at the microphone. Jackie was standing to his right, smiling at him as he spoke about the future in a clipped voice of high seriousness, but Caitlin was only half listening. She was distracted by the faces of the crowd. All of them looked at Jack as if they were seeing, for the first time, the dazzling embodiment of the dreams immigrants carried here—in Jack’s case, a dream three generations old, when another Kennedy, fleeing the Potato Famine, traded his Irish farm for the slums of East Boston, and now his great-grandson would live in the White House.
Jack concluded his speech and grinned, then glanced over at Jackie and said, “So now my wife and I prepare for a new administration and for a new baby.”
As reporters peppered him with questions, Caitlin left the armory. She was surprised to see Danny standing outside. More surprising was how happy she was to see him. In fact, when she thought about it, she was usually happy to see Danny. “What’re you doing here?”
Danny said, “You promised to go to Coney Island with me.”
“That’s in Brooklyn, not Hyannis.”
“I caught a ride with some Irish cops who want to see their hero. Can I get a lift home?”
“Of course.”
The sun was out, and Caitlin’s spirits rose as she walked with Danny to the hotel. At the corner, a redheaded girl with pigtails pedaled past them on a tricycle, going somewhere in a hurry. Jack, it appeared, was already getting the country moving again. That’s what he promised during the campaign. A better America where even a Catholic could get elected president, and the hungry would be fed, and one day we’d all dance on the moon.
Down on Ocean Street, the wind was blowing off the water. Caitlin and Danny paused to watch a yellow fishing boat leaving the harbor. Life would be better for her too. Her past would no longer stand in the way of her present. She would lock Gabe away in that inviolable chamber of her heart where she stored the memories of her mother. The rest of her she’d save for another husband. Gabe would approve. Jack was right. The dead do love you forever. You can’t lose them.
After marrying, Caitlin would return to Jersey. It would be an easier ride to Newark and her job at the newspaper. There was a Dutch Colonial on Burroughs Way in Maplewood she’d always admired. It was next to a public grammar school, so she could spare her children the swinging rosaries of the nuns. Caitlin would plant rosebushes in her yard, and her husband would set up a grill and a kiddie pool. Life would be good there. Eight tranquil years would pass by in a bright turning of seasons, with Jack and Jackie and Caroline and the new baby in the White House, and the First Family would happily grow older with all the other families in America.
It was coming. This better time. Caitlin was sure of it as she stood next to Danny in the sunlight, watching the boat move across the blue water and all the way out to the horizon.
A Note on Sources
As is typical of historically inspired works of fiction, Their Shadows Deep was written against the background of events that were widely reported in the news at the time of their occurrence. While the names of real people appear, all the actions and dialogue concerning these people are products solely of the author’s imagination and are not intended to depict actual scenes or to change the fictional nature of the book.
Anecdotes and historical quotes appearing in Their Shadows Deep were sourced and inspired by the following books, articles, historical papers, and public records.
Two aspects of this novel deserve special mention.
The first is JFK’s imaginary conversations with his sister Kick. Despite the millions of words written about JFK, his inner world remains something of a mystery—partially obscured by his enduring heroic image, his murder and the lingering national grief, and the incomplete record he left us of his deepest feelings, which he generally hid behind a pose of detachment.
However, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a former special assistant to President Kennedy, never believed he was detached. In a foreword to Of Poetry and Power: Poems Occasioned by the Presidency and by the Death of John F. Kennedy, Schlesinger claimed that this pose was to protect JFK from the waves of emotion that threatened to overwhelm him and make it impossible for him to cope with the disheartening realities of his life.
There were many of these: his poor health since childhood; the frequent hospitalizations, failed surgeries, severe back problems, and chronic pain; his conviction that he would die young; the deaths of his brother and sister in their twenties; and his reckless sexual behavior. Ted Sorensen, a JFK adviser and speechwriter from his days in the Senate until JFK’s murder in Dallas, speculated in his memoir, Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History, that JFK was, at times, ashamed of his recklessness, and he must have had his share of dark nights of the soul about his infidelities.
