Chapter 28
Thursday, January 19, 1961
The day before the inauguration, snow falls. It layers the streets and trees outside. A blistering wind. It is dark by four. I watch from the window of my bedroom in Georgetown as cars snake through the whiteness, snow falling through their headlights.
As a child, I loved to watch snow fall through light, each flake a soul, emerging for that instant into its own brightness, then falling back into the dark. Beyond the bedroom door, the house is full. It is time.
Eerie, haunting.Those are the words that come to me as the limousine flows through the night streets toward Constitution Hall. Bill Walton is with us. “You’ll float away,” I told Jack. “As soon as we arrive, someone will come and bear you off. Bill can stay with me.”
The three of us sit in the back of the car, snow crushed under the tires. The frost a white dust on the windows, the glass blurred with the inside heat, our bodies and breath. Time slows, like we are moving from the past into the future. I can feel an excitement I’ve not let myself feel—in the dark mystical silence of the car where we sit on this night journey toward the inaugural concert and from there to the inaugural gala. Jack is in his tails. I am in my white gown, a necklace, heavy and cool against my throat, grounding me. And the snow blows everywhere, free in a way I love, as we travel wrapped in the warm isolation of the car, moving through the cold and the dark outside.
I am with Jack, and I can feel him near me, close. Then he turns to Bill Walton and says:
“Turn on the lights so they can see Jackie.”