Chapter 36
January. The elevators at the National Gallery break down the night of the opening of the Mona Lisa. Clint carries the train of my dress as I walk up the stairs. I laugh when we reach the second floor.
“I was afraid I’d trip, Mr. Hill, and we’d both roll right down the stairs, me in my chiffon like pink tumbleweed.”
I go to find André Malraux. The painting has been mounted in the West Sculpture Hall, against a velvet backdrop. The French and American flags flank it, along with two Marines. Malraux will speak first, then Jack. I read Jack’s speech as he was crafting it. It captures what I want to convey: the discipline of creative work; how art can exist at the heart of power; how it can transcend political and national differences and forge a common ground; how Da Vinci was not only an artist but a military engineer, who understood that the world of events and the world of imagination are one.
“La Joconde can be your symbol of the Cold War,” I told Jack. “Like your moon landing. A symbol of the work you’ve done to safeguard freedom. So many people will have the chance to see this painting while it’s here. That’s what art is meant to be.”
That night, the loudspeaker fails in the middle of Jack’s speech. The microphone gives out, and he has to shout to still the crowd. He shifts gears to what he does so well. He tells a few jokes and repeats key words of Malraux’s, about hope, the friendship between our nations, and a shared commitment to diplomacy and art. Malraux had described America as a young country entrusted with the future, but he was too soft-spoken to be heard over the cocktail chatter of two thousand guests. Maybe a thousand too many, I think. But I am happy. Despite the mechanical failures. No elevator, no loudspeaker, speeches that run off script, and too much chaos. It won’t matter. The speeches will be printed as they were written. There will be photographs in the papers, with the chaos excised. To the world, the evening will appear far more elegant than it was. For me, the life is here—in the night itself, with all its mad flaws. There’s magic in that, imperfect, glorious, free.
Days later, when Jack gives his State of the Union address, I sit in the balcony. The air in the high-ceilinged room is cold. I can feel the stiff curl of my hair against my cheek. “I always wanted the helm of Hades,” I told Kenneth as he styled it that morning. “The one that confers invisibility.”
Kenneth laughed. “I don’t think that’s in your cards today.”
The floor seats are filled. Lady Bird sits with me as Jack speaks from the podium about public service and the nation’s courage during the missile crisis. He calls for a commitment to educate every child and to strengthen fundamental American rights—the right to counsel, healthcare, and, most essential, “the most precious and powerful right in the world, the right to vote in a free election.”
He lets a beat of silence fall.
To me, it’s the most cogent speech he’s given since taking office. He weaves disparate issues together in deft ways. He balances the accomplishments of the past year with his emergent vision for the next. There’s strength in how he stands, how he talks, in his eyes. His voice cool. The embers of that early rage have cohered into a new resolution. Jack is fiercely logical. He always has been. Competitive, but also strategic. Now, though, it feels that something new has crystallized—not simply raw ambition or political calculation but some new bright grain of belief, born from ideals as well as failure. Over these last months, that quiet faith has merged into his rhetoric. He’s not a man who likes to be sideswiped by feeling, ever. He doesn’t trust it. Perhaps because it already runs deep. But as I watch him speak that day, I understand he’s begun to grasp how passion, when it comes from a place of integrity, can be leveraged to invoke change.
Waves of morning nausea. I’ve felt it every day for the past two weeks. It hits out of nowhere. I skip coffee, eat dry toast or sip ginger ale to take the edge off.
“Good morning, George,” I hear Jack say to his valet. I feel his weight shift, legs swing to the floor. I pull the blankets up. He rummages through the papers, I hear the distant rush of water running into a bath.
At eight, Miss Shaw brings in the children. Their little feet and voices, then a splash.
“That was my duck!” John cries.
“There are five more,” Jack says. “Here, they’re all up. And we’ll find that other one. What about you, Buttons, you’re not too old for a duck, are you?”
I slip out of bed. In the bathroom, the children have lined plastic ducks along the tub edge. The cables and memos Jack was reading before they came in are soaked. The ink bleeds.
They stay with him in the bedroom as he gets dressed. They lie on the floor, faces propped in their hands, watching cartoons. John rolls from one end of the room to the other until he strikes a hard surface, a bedpost, his father’s leg, then he rolls back. I sit in the rocking chair I had repadded for Jack’s back, as Caroline pulls him away from breakfast down to their exercise routine on the floor. They climb over him, their bodies wrapping his, until he has to leave for work. I should tell him soon. It’s been four weeks. I’m afraid, though. I don’t want to tell him, or anyone, yet.
“Mary,” I ask my secretary, Mary Gallagher, later that morning, “would you say I’ve done enough as First Lady?”
“More than enough.”
“Then now that the Mona Lisa is behind us, I’m taking the veil.”
I don’t tell her why. I tell Jack the following weekend when we go to New York to see Lee. After Sunday Mass, as we walk up Park Avenue, I tell him my period is five weeks late. For now, I tell him, I don’t want anyone else to know. He doesn’t break his stride, but he is smiling.
“You’ll have to stop riding,” he says.
“Luckily it’s winter.”
He pauses on the corner, catches my arm to keep me on the curb as the traffic flows by.
“And no water-skiing, Jackie.”
“Or tightrope-walking.”
“I mean it. You have to be careful.”
“We can still take walks.”
“Nothing too strenuous.”
“Fresh air is good.”
“You can’t get chilled.”
“And not too many teas,” I say. He laughs.
“What about the March dinner dance for Eugene Black?” he says.
“I’m always up for a good dinner dance.”
“And the Emancipation Proclamation fete?”
“Absolutely.”
“King isn’t coming,” he says.
I nod. Pam had told me. But I don’t tell him I already knew. “Did they give a reason?”
“King says as long as young Black men are being arrested for sit-ins and protests—”
“He wants you to move forward with a bill,” I say quietly, but in the blare and swirl of the city, I feel the air between us tense.
We’re down in Palm Beach with Joe for a few days in February when I bring up Mary Meyer. Tony Bradlee had mentioned how pleased her sister, Mary, was to be invited to the dinner dance in March. Which surprised me. Mary wasn’t on my list.
Jack and I are out for a drive in the Lincoln, windows rolled halfway down, sunshine moving through the car. Green hedges, manicured lawns, and low stucco houses flow by.
“Jack, I didn’t invite Mary.”
“Is her name on the list?”
“You didn’t put it there?”
He shrugs, and I know then the talk I’ve heard about Jack and Mary Meyer is true.
“You and I both enjoy Mary’s company,” he says.
I feel a surge of rage. He makes a turn, heading back toward Palm Beach. Sunlight blinding off the hood. We drive in silence. There was a look I saw exchanged between Jack and Mary the last time we were all together. Mary had come to the Residence with Tony. She was wearing a shirtdress and those hammered-gold earrings she often wore, which seemed too large for her face but always made you look again. A year after we were married, Jack and I moved next door to Mary and her then-husband, Cord Meyer. Jack had known Mary since they were in school together at Choate. Mary and I would sometimes take walks through Georgetown and along the canal path. Then Mary’s son was struck by a car and killed. He was nine. Her marriage split up. We’d seen her less after that. Until recently.
I unroll the window farther and close my eyes.
The following day, I strike her name from the guest list.
“I had Pam call her,” I tell Jack, “to explain our space constraints. Eugene Black and his wife invited so many of their own friends, but since the dinner is in their honor, we really have no choice. Mary is still coming for the dancing at ten, so you can end it with her face-to-face.”
He stares at me. He doesn’t say anything.
“It’s not that I can’t handle it, Jack. Don’t you see? It becomes unbearable to me when I think about what Caroline and John will have to endure when it gets out, because it will, someday, get out. You know that. And in my mind, I see their faces. The burning disappointment and the shame. I think about that.”
He sits down, silent.
“It’s not the women I’m afraid of, Jack. For someone as canny as you, you seem blind about this. I find it stunning you don’t realize that someday, some writer, like a Mailer, is going to come along and blow the whole house down. And Caroline will come to you, or to me, and she will say, Is it true? Or, worse, she will look at you differently and won’t say anything at all.”
I pick up the seating chart I’ve been working on, my pen and notebook, and walk out.