Chapter 65
Fall 1975
There’s a crowd gathered outside the Viking offices at 625 Madison. I slip out of the taxi a block away, into the side entrance.
Tom introduces me to the staff. They’re polite, of course, but skeptical. Why wouldn’t they be? I try to connect. It all feels awkward. Tom shows me the office that will be mine. It’s small, so simple my heart leaps. Just a desk, file cabinets, a swivel chair.
“I love it,” I say. “Now I can work my way up to a room with a view.”
The crowd is there, outside every morning when I arrive and every afternoon when I leave. When I dash across the street to the diner for lunch, I steel myself just inside the door. I close my face into the empty face and push out into the flash of camera bulbs.
Weeks pass. I begin to get a handle on my days. I bring my lunch in a paper bag and eat in my office. I get my own coffee. I draft my own memos. I wait in line with everyone else to use the Xerox machines. And there’s a certain electrifying magic to the ordinary. I feel like this is something I’ve waited my whole life to know. Most evenings, I have a quiet dinner with John at home. After we eat, while he does his homework, I read manuscripts. I work only part-time. I call into the office every Monday and Friday to check in.
Some of the crazy continues. One day a bomb threat. Often, uninvited strangers arrive at reception, insisting I’ll want to see them. There’s a heavy stream of interview requests and canvas sacks full of what Tom calls “Jackie mail.” Once, among the letters and manuscripts, a .38 caliber arrives in a manila envelope addressed to me with a note.
I’m stepping into my office when Tom tells me about the gun. I stop, my fingers on the knob. It will never end. The mail and the threats will come. The crowds will wait.
“Are you all right?” Tom says.
“Oh yes,” I say. I step into my office, take out a blank sheet of paper, and I start a list for twenty potential book projects—why they might work, ways I can help make them work, why they are stories that need to be told.
That weekend, Caroline is home from London for five days. When John gets out of school on Friday afternoon, we pile into my jelly-bean-green BMW and drive out to the house in New Jersey. There was a storm the week before. The leaves had turned, and that storm took them down. Now they’re strewn across the road and the fields, gorgeous streams of burnished reds, coppers, golds. The children are bickering—not an argument—just that playful banter of you’re wrong and I’m right. John tells his sister that he’s planning to raise a python in her bathtub while she’s away. “Noooooo,” Caroline says. “You won’t let him, Mom, will you?” The road is awash with leaves; the beauty of them catches in my throat.
Just after Christmas, at a dinner at my apartment, the Schlesingers, the Mudds, and the Duchins raise a glass to my new adventure.
“Say a few words,” Arthur says. “Tell us. What’s it like to be a working woman again?”
“I love books. It’s that simple. I love how they expand my mind. Like travel, books let you explore other cultures, perspectives, histories—worlds markedly different from your own.”
“Hear, hear!” Arthur lifts his glass. The others join in. The candles are burning down into castled piles of wax. No one mentions the rumblings in the news—allegations of Jack’s affair with Judith Exner, a woman linked with mob boss Sam Giacana. The unraveling has only begun. In my gut I know this, and I hate what I know.
A few days later, an outline of Exner’s half-finished memoir appears in the Times, along with the claim that our marriage was in poor shape. In early March, news about Mary Meyer hits the papers. Two-year White House affair with D.C. artist…J.F.K. smoked grass. Laced through the smut are details of Mary’s murder.
That familiar awful heat under my skin.
It will burn for a while. Every detail—true and not—will catch like tinder. It’s our children I think about. And I think about walking into work tomorrow. The meetings I have next week. The ballet I was planning to attend. It’ll be everywhere by then, and I’ll relive it every time I meet someone’s eyes and see that complex web of pity, disbelief, and parasitic wonder. I told you this would happen.
I grab my coat and take a taxi to my friend Karen’s apartment. I walk in and sit down.
“You’ve read it,” Karen says.
“As much as I’ll read.”
Karen sits down next to me, and I want to explain that as long as it was secret, I could handle it. The rules of marriage were different back then. I knew what I’d signed up for. I don’t say that. I don’t try to justify it.
“Learn to let things go,” you told me once. “Be like a horse flicking away flies in summer.”
The edges of my eyes burn now for how ironic it is—that your wisdom should intercede to help me through the awful consequence of your foolishness and your hubris, your belief that the world would never turn against you.
As I leave Karen’s that day, a woman in the elevator turns around and stares. There’s no one else in the elevator. I slip on my sunglasses and look straight ahead, hoping all that woman can see is her own reflection in the mirrored lens.
I hurl myself into work. A book of Abraham Lincoln daguerreotypes. The Firebird, a collection of Russian fairy tales. Lawrence Durrell’s new novel, Sicilian Carousel. I take on a project with Diana Vreeland, who, over lunch one day, leans across the table to me with that Kabuki face and jet-black hair and says:
“There’s nothing duller, Jackie, than a smooth, perfect-skinned woman. A woman is beautiful by her scars.”
One afternoon, soon after Jack’s birthday—he would have turned fifty-nine—as I am walking up to the reservoir for my run, I notice that my sneaker lace is loose. I stop to retie it. There’s a couple nearby on a blanket, young, graceless, fumbling with each other like they can’t keep up with their own desire. A few yards away, a baby carriage in the shade. It is a Sunday. Services are over. The bells are ringing. I turn away and start up the path, the sound of those bells melding with the dappled shadows and the trees.
The landslide of tell-alls continues. Thirdhand gossip, anonymous interviews, insider secrets “newly revealed.” Jack’s affairs, our alleged unhappiness—it all gets dredged up. Juicy bits, nasty bits—some true, most conclusively not. It’s heartbreaking, humiliating, but after a while it just becomes too much to brace myself or try to anticipate what someone might say to John at school, what someone at work might have seen in a tabloid magazine while standing in line at the drugstore. Headline after headline. Jack and I, Jack and the women, Bobby and I, those nights after Jack died, the drink and the grief and those little blue pills—what might have happened that shouldn’t have, and in the end did it? God, there’s just so much. That glittering trash.
At a certain point it begins to feel like it’s the mirage of a woman they’ve conjured. She and I only happen to share the same name. She’s a caricature cobbled out of smear and myth, a cartoon life that runs alongside mine. Maybe it was always this way. I slip out from under it. I go on living my life—a woman in a trench coat, a scarf, and a pair of sunglasses, walking to work, so ordinary and visible I disappear.
“There’s nothing more important than books,” I say to John one evening after dinner at home. “When people are reading, they’re thinking. That’s how change takes place.”
John nods—his earnest dark eyes, patient with me always. At the same time, I know there’s no easy combination of words I can come up with to express the thrill of living in the world of books. I love to read the early drafts of a manuscript, to feel the work of a mind unfinished, then read it through again and mark it up, pencil carving the text so it comes alive on the page.
Cut it back,I’ll write in the margin. Be ruthless. Hold to what you want to say and how you choose to tell it. Everything is story.
August 1977. Hammersmith Farm will be sold. I go to walk the rooms of the house where I grew up. Then my mother and I drive to Bailey’s Beach. We sit on the porch at the beach club and order lunch, and I remember the swim Jack and I took the summer before we were married.
“Do you love me?” I asked you that day. It was the first time I felt bold enough to ask. And our mothers were calling us from up on the porch. We pretended not to hear. We swam and we did not get out; they kept calling, waving, two figures with their dresses and stockings, their hats and pearls, like tiny paper dolls, and I understood then that the mothers belonged to the formal machinations of that world while you and I belonged to the sea.
“Are you going to order?” my mother is asking now, glancing over the menu.
“What?”
“For lunch, what are you having for lunch?”
Once, on Air Force One, I was changing between events. I’d started to unbutton my blouse; it was half off my shoulder when you came up behind me and touched me. It surprised me—that you’d come so near without my realizing, and that you had touched me that way. You ran one finger down my body, from the edge of my breast to my waist, and then you looked at me and you did not say it, because it wasn’t the kind of thing you would say, but your eyes did. They said,You are mine.
Some sand has blown in under the clubhouse door. I stand up and drop my napkin on the chair.
“Where are you going?” my mother says as I slip off my shoes. Tucking them under the table, I step toward the door with the crack underneath, then through it, to the porch and the bands of sun beyond the veranda, steps leading down to the beach.
“Jackie, where are you going?”
“Don’t worry,” I say. “I’ll be right back.”
I leave Viking and go to work at Doubleday. The following year, I find a stretch of coast on Martha’s Vineyard. I buy the land to build a house near the cliffs of Aquinnah, where the sea is woven into the sky. That spring, I walk the land with Bunny Mellon. We talk about the long gravel drive I love that winds over a creek with an old wooden gate. We draft the details of the house—saltbox, cedar shingle, white trim. I tell Bunny I want a home the children will want to return to, years from now, with their children.
“I want it to be happy,” I say, “with comfortable places to sit and flowers in every room.”
On the ground we lay the house out with string.
Caroline is finishing her junior year of college. John will be a freshman in the fall. There’s a girl he’s begun to bring around. Shy, dark hair, a glowing smile. They stop by the apartment one night on their way to the movies. They have an hour to kill. We talk for a while. John, restless, checks his watch, pushes a hand through his hair, and walks to the stereo. He sets a record on the player. As the song begins, he asks the girl, “Good for you?” She nods. She glances from John to me, then back to him, as he walks around the room, that caged gorgeous energy he has. Don’t lose your heart, I want to tell her. But how beautiful it is, that shining hopefulness of love before it learns. He comes back and sits down, leg still jiggling, and the air is filled with music, a sweetness to the night that reminds me of a life I lived before; for a moment I let it rush in—the joy of what I loved and dreamed and lost.
When they leave, I walk them out. They’re heading downtown. I’m going the other way, meeting my friend Maurice for dinner. The doorman offers to hail a taxi. “We’re all going to walk tonight,” I say, “but thank you.” I hug my son goodbye. His arms come around me, quick and strong and tight, then he lets me go. Half a block up, I look back. His arm around the girl, they’ve crossed the street toward the park, the wall and the dark and the shapes of the green. Light off the streetlamps rains down on them like blessings.
The presidential library is nearly finished. A tower of glass at Columbia Point that overlooks Boston Harbor. When the work is done, there will be a dedication. Teddy has told me he intends to run against Jimmy Carter. He won’t win. I know this. I left the last family meeting in Hyannis Port knowing it. A vague misguidedness hangs like a shadow over his campaign. But I’ll stand by him if this is what he wants. Or what he thinks he has to want. At the dedication of the library, Teddy will speak, as will Caroline, and John will read a Stephen Spender poem. One evening, when I am with Maurice, I read the poem aloud to him. My eyes ache as I near the last stanza.
Born of the sun, they traveled a short while toward the sun…
Maurice’s hand slips over mine. He doesn’t say anything, but I can feel he understands. Poetry is not a luxury. Not to me. It cuts to the quick like any other tool of survival.
“In the days after that day,” I say, “I realized my only chance at life was with the children. They are my home.” I look at him when I say this.
“Of course,” he says. “How could it be otherwise?”
I feel something in me settle.
It’s unique, the friendship between us. I can tell him things I can’t share with anyone else. I can talk about Jack—not only Jack in the past but how he still burns through my present, and how I’ve come to understand that desire for what is irretrievable can be a sort of prayer. I’ve told him how Jack devoured life in a way that both fascinated and terrified me, like a man sucking the meat out of a lobster claw—the books he read, the food he ate, the boats he sailed, and, yes, the women. While the library is about his legacy, his ideals, and his call to service, for me it’s also a way to keep alive the catalytic hunger that defined him.
With Maurice, I can also share the harder things that even now, years later, I can’t bear to look at head-on, how Jack and I seemed to be finally figuring things out in those last few months before he died. I can still feel the sharp, heartbroken beauty of that time, that fall of 1963, at once so brief and endless, and the rage when he was taken from me. Maurice just listens, and something in how he listens softens the bitterness.
He is kind to me. He helps manage my finances, and he understands that the money I have is not simply money but freedom to live on my own terms. I love the nimble reach of his mind. Erudite, curious. We read poetry together and speak French. We go to concerts, museums, and for walks in the park. I first met him when Jack was a senator and Maurice was a diamond merchant in Africa. Part of me loves that he has that window into my past, though we rarely speak of it. He’s the kind of person who grasps that memory is wreckage touched in sunlight, and the soul isn’t something whole inside us. Rather, it comes to us in fragments, and it’s for us to build a sense of order out of shards and meaning where there’s none. He is still married. He’s moved out of the home he shared with his wife into rooms at the Stanhope Hotel, a few blocks from 1040 Fifth Avenue.
I turn fifty at the end of July 1979. There’s a flurry of articles. One I actually like comes out of an interview I agreed to do with Gloria Steinem about what it means for a woman to work, which women of my generation were not supposed to want to do. There’s a scathing piece in The Washington Post I decide to read. I pick up a few errors, typos, Skorpios spelled incorrectly, and punctuation where there shouldn’t be. I’m halfway through when I realize I’m bored. It doesn’t say anything, and it strikes me then how often it’s just this way with a woman’s story. No one wants to know the real story—the private story—the evolution of a woman’s interior life. They want events on a linear string. Some twists and turns, a little joy, a little danger, tragedy, of course, and, if there’s some transgression, comeuppance. When they tell the story of a woman, they never get right up against what she might have felt and thought and seen and feared and wondered. Rather, they tell the story of what happened to her, and in the world’s eyes, usually what happens to a woman is men.
Until at a certain point, perhaps, she decides that’s not what the story will be.
I fold the newspaper, put it aside, and pick up the manuscript I was working on.
Because the world will just keep at it, poking around, digging, turning over the dirt. The world will never stop trying to see past the drawn curtains of a room I stepped out of years ago.