Chapter 51
January 1964
Outside this interim house that is not mine (lent to me, as much of my life, it seems, has been lent), crowds linger on the sidewalk. They call my name and leave bouquets of flowers and gifts, offerings that get trampled, stolen, knocked over.
“They want to eat me alive,” I tell Bobby.
“No,” he says, “they worship you.”
“Only because I’m obliterated.”
I hate how bitter it sounds. I know it bothers him—that tone in my voice. Like I’m accusing him too. Which isn’t what I mean.
We talk about the writer Manchester, who’s anxious to get started on the book he’s been contracted to write. Not yet, I say. I’m not ready. There are other interviews as well that have to be done with Arthur Schlesinger about Jack’s presidency.
“To set the historical record,” Bobby says. “We need to start in a few weeks.”
Too soon.
He tells me about the Warren Commission investigation of the assassination, to confirm there was no conspiracy.
“How could there not have been a conspiracy?” I say.
I’ve gone back to the Edith Hamilton book, The Greek Way. I’ve reread, twice, the chapter on Euripides, who wrote about war with a modern eye, peeling away the sham glory of violence to the evil underneath. He was the one who wrote about the women. Hecuba, Andromache, Cassandra. The ones who were left.
“I won’t be able to stay here,” I tell Bobby. “In Washington.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“France.”
“I mean where here?”
“Not here.”
“New York?”
“I love New York.”
“Good,” he says. “We’ll move to New York.”
I smile. “We? That’ll cause a stir.”
“I’ll run for senator from New York. We’ll move there.”
“Won’t we have to stagger things a bit? People will begin to think the unimaginable.”
He doesn’t answer, and I suddenly realize he’s already considered this.
“No one will think anything,” he says, “because there’s nothing to think.”
“You must try to like Lyndon a little more,” I say lightly, “if you want to run for Senate.”
Still Bobby comes, every morning, every evening. And still there’s the burnout design of that day in November between us—the memory I have and he does not.
Sometimes we talk. Sometimes hours pass without us exchanging a word. Sometimes I cry, and he holds me until I sleep. Sometimes when I wake up, he’s gone, but more often he’s sitting by my bed in a funnel of light with my book The Greek Way, underlining passages, dog-earing a page.
“That book will be ruined, Bobby, if you keep going at it like that.”
He glances up, like he’d forgotten I was there.
“Read to me, please,” I say, taking the book from him, turning pages until I come to a passage I want. “Here.”
His voice is awkward at first—the funny harsh twang that reminds me of Jack, though his voice is rougher. I settle against the pillow, close my eyes. The words feel soft and cool.
He comes to the end of a section.
“Do you want me to go on?” he says.
“I love the stories of the Greeks,” I say, “how they believed in tragedy as transformation, that out of horrific pain you could construct a way forward.”
He doesn’t say anything.
“It wasn’t a perfect marriage, Bobby.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“I shouldn’t have left him last fall to go to Greece with Lee. I was devastated over Patrick. That was most of it, but I was angry too.”
I don’t elaborate. Even to say it feels like a betrayal.
“Jack loved you, Jackie, more than he ever loved anyone—”
“Don’t. Just lie down with me for a while.”
He is looking at the wall across the room. I touch that part of his cheekbone, not with love or sympathy, not with anything really beyond an abstract macabre fascination. I can see how grief has done its work, shifting the structure of his face under the skin, darker hollows below his eyes. Scoured. The line of his mouth is thin and dry.
The sky is clear. I’ve left the curtains pulled back, and the moon shines through the divided window sash.
That night I cry for hours, my body like some vague streak of lightning in his arms.
He is gone when I wake up again. The overhead is off, but he left a lamp on. The room is empty. Just that pool of lamplight and the burning strangeness of being the one who remains.
I agree to meet with Arthur Schlesinger for the oral history he’s building about Jack’s presidency.
“I won’t talk to him about Dallas,” I tell Bobby the morning Arthur is due to arrive.
“You don’t have to.”
“And these tapes will be sealed, for as long as I decide they should be?”
“Yes.”
“And I’ll keep the right to strike anything I wish I hadn’t said?”
“It’s all up to you.”
“What about the writer, Manchester—is that also up to me?”
“If that’s what you want.”
“Good.”
As the tapes begin to spin, it’s like I can’t talk. Arthur’s voice is familiar, kind, but the words slip over the surface of things.
“Jack would read,” I say, “waking, at the table, at meals, after dinner, in the bathtub, a book propped open on his bureau as he was doing his tie. It’s funny, the things you remember that surface out of nowhere.”
I talk about General de Gaulle, Khrushchev’s wife, and the missile crisis—how hard it was, tense and strained, those thirteen days.
“When Jack came home for a nap, I’d lie down with him. When he went for a walk, he’d take me with him. And do you know what he said when the crisis was over? ‘Well, if anybody’s going to shoot me, today’s the day they should do it. I’ll never top this.’ He was the most unselfconscious person I ever met. In America, we have a great civilization—and so many don’t realize it. He and I used to talk about that.”
I stop there.
I don’t say anything about how Once upon a time there was a girl who wanted to disappear, but instead she grew up to be an artist whose medium was fame.
I don’t talk about how every relationship requires its own set of strategies.
I don’t say anything about mad young hearts or how once, before we were married, I was reading a poem to him, he leaned over and kissed me, and the words and the heat mixed between our mouths.
I do not, of course, tell about that day of the tub and the whip at Glen Ora, or how I told Jack it wasn’t the women—it was never the women—it was the writer who’d come along someday to dig the dirt up and blow the house down.
I don’t talk about how after Patrick slipped out of the world, I left and went to Greece, even when Jack asked me to stay. I turned away from his face and the longing in it I had waited years for because I’d finally given up waiting, and I didn’t want to risk my heart, and now I deeply regret that. I don’t talk about Dallas: the blazing sun, the sound, the sudden dark of his blood—hypnotic, mystical, iridescent.
You don’t get time back. Any of it. You don’t get to make a different choice in a moment you think will be just another moment in a span of years you assume you have.
You don’t get the chance, for example, to turn around and choose instead to stay.
Sometimes, oddly, I see him throwing a football in Georgetown, that free, beautiful strength of his body, even when his back would twist and he would be in pain.
I don’t talk about the countless times he’d look at me across a room, at a political event, a dinner, or a party. He’d search a sea of people to find me, his eyes on my face, and I became transparent, rootless, a balloon, belonging nowhere and to no one else when he looked at me that way.
I say none of this.
Life, when it happens, is more full of silence than words. I give Arthur only the words he came for.
The tapes spin. One reel flows to the next. I tong ice into a glass, sip my drink, and I tell him how sometimes, at night, Jack and I would read together and sometimes he’d ask for a record, the floor cool under my feet as I crossed the room to set one on the turntable; the notes would rise, and when the songs ended, every night before bed, he would say a prayer.
I glance at Bobby. Another match, another cigarette; it all continues on until we get to the part about happiness.
“I was happy,” I say, “for Jack, that he could be proud of me. Because you know it made him so happy, and that made me happy. So those were our happiest years.”
The words catch in my throat. I glance at the tape. Arthur looks at me. I nod. He shuts it off.
There was nothing rarefied about it. It was simple. A boy and a girl. A man and a woman. A marriage. With all the tiny thorns and joys that reside in that word.
“Sometimes I feel it’s wrong,” I say. I don’t look at Bobby, because I know he won’t want me to say this. “We talk like there is only one history.”
“People believed in Jack,” Arthur says. “I think if there’s something the world will need a year from now, or fifty years from now, it will be to know there was once a man worth believing in.”
The tape is still off. My throat so dry, like all that’s real are those things left unsaid.
A few weeks ago I was out with the children, dirty snow plowed up on either side of the street. We ducked into a drugstore. I’d promised them hot chocolate. As I walked up to the counter to order, John saw the magazine cover with the blurred photograph of us in the car.
Mummy, close your eyes.
“You have to get stronger,” Bobby says to me after Arthur leaves. “Get past this. Move on.”
“That’s Ethel talking.”
“There’s a priest we’d like you to meet.”
“Ethel thinks I need some God.”
“He’s a great tennis player.”
“Ethel thinks I need a better forehand.”
“Please, Jackie, just try.”
I look at him, the dizzying rush of alone.
He thinks he understands. Your brother. He thinks we are in this together, but he was eating lunch when he heard. A tuna fish sandwich. Ethel answered the ringing phone and told him to pick up the patio extension. It was Hoover. Calling to say you’d been shot. That’s how Bobby learned. Through the words of a man he did not trust.
He knows nothing of bone and blood.
I am suddenly angry. Ethel is moving on, the rest of the country is moving on, and your brother is telling me to move on, even as he is still falling apart. He’s lost weight. He barely sleeps. He’s been wearing your clothes—your old blue topcoat, your leather bomber jacket that hangs all wrong on him, your kid brother, his frame too small. I should be more forgiving. He is sleepless, as I am sleepless. Tormented by the possibility that actions he took in Cuba and how he cracked down on the mob, those choices he made as attorney general, could have led to your death and maybe did. In that sense, perhaps, he is no further away from the awful dark of it than I am.
“I’m sorry, Jackie,” Bobby says.