Jackie

Chapter 15

Fall 1953

Our wedding is compared to the Astor wedding of 1934. (Joe is ecstatic over this, I learn.) On the front page of The New York Times, the day after the ceremony in Newport, there’s a photograph of us, cutting into the five-tier cake. Notables Attend Senator’s Wedding.

There are painstaking details about my dress—tapered bodice, ivory tissue silk, and the lace veil woven with orange blossoms. There are details of my bridesmaids in their pink taffeta. Lee is my matron of honor. Bobby is Jack’s best man. There are details of the reception, over eight hundred of our nearest and dearest flung across the Hammersmith lawn, following the ceremony at St. Mary’s Church performed by Archbishop Cushing with the assistance of four priests.

I tease Jack: “How many priests does it take to marry a Kennedy?”

There are no details in the papers, though, about the scratches down Jack’s cheek from a run-in he had with a rosebush while playing a drunken game of football with his brothers and friends the night before. No details of how my wedding gown was ruined earlier that week when a pipe burst in the dressmaker’s studio, and the dress had to be entirely remade. Nothing written about the tears I bit back when I realized my father was not just late but not coming at all. Something small and old walked over my heart as I took my stepfather Hughdie’s arm instead and he walked me down the aisle.

The press is told my father was suddenly struck by a very bad cold—not that my mother sent someone to check on my father at his hotel when she couldn’t reach him by phone; that someone found him half dressed in his tux and more than half in the bag.

In the car leaving the reception, I brush rice off my lap and pull rose-petal confetti from my hair. The pearl-and-diamond bracelet Jack gave me the night before, my “something new,” glints.

“I’m so happy, Jack,” I say. He smiles at me. I lean my head against his arm.

“That’s not comfortable,” he says, something pained in the set of his jaw. “Just my back hurts from standing all day.” He shifts in the seat, turning slightly away toward the window.

On our honeymoon in Acapulco, in the little pink villa, I feel a strange deep joy being with him, near him, that sense of the sun in my body, an ache in my thighs from where his weight pressed down. A timelessness as the hours pass, marked only by heat, skin, desire.

His fingers brush the hair from my neck. I feel him inside me—a wash of light.

“It’s hot,” he says.

“How about a swim? A cool drink?”

“Let’s go inside.”

“Again?”

“Don’t you want to?” His smile then.

Afterward, we lie on the veranda in the shade. Once, when I get up, he tugs the edge of the towel I’ve wrapped around me. It slips from my hands; I go to grasp it, but he takes my wrist and pulls me down.

We drive the winding coastal road up through the lush cliffs, then back down the mountainside into the city that borders the bay and miles of white-sugar sand. We wander narrow streets, past small shops and cafés. A cart heaped with oranges, some halved open to lure passersby.

“Cut?” the man asks in Spanish, a gesture with his hands to mimic a knife.

“Por favor,” I say.

He runs the blade through the fruit to quarter it and hands it back to me. I suck at the pieces, peeling out the insides with my teeth, my hands sticky and damp. I toss the peel and lick the juice off.

Jack laughs. “You’re a mess.” He must see the surprise on my face. “Hey, I was just joking. Sorry.” He drapes an arm around me as we walk. “You’re a Kennedy now,” he says, his voice gentle then, close. “You’re going to have to learn to take a joke.”

From Acapulco we fly to California. I finally write to my father to tell him I love him but how sad I was the day of the wedding when he wasn’t there. Through the window, below the terraced eaves, I see Jack sitting by the pool, talking with a young woman on a chaise longue nearby. He pulls his chair closer.

I leave the letter unfinished and head downstairs. As I come up to them, I toss my book and towel onto the end of Jack’s chair.

“Hello, sweetheart,” I say.

“Hey, Jackie, this is Margaret. We have all sorts of things in common. Friends mostly.”

The girl named Margaret laughs.

“Lovely,” I say. “Perhaps you’ll join us for dinner tonight, Margaret?”

The girl’s face shifts, wary now, dark eyes surveying the two of us.

“I think I have plans tonight. Another time, though.” She slips on her pool sandals and strides away.

“I hope I didn’t interrupt anything.”

“Just a girl,” Jack says. He picks the newspaper up off the concrete beside his chair.

That fall, we’ve agreed, I’ll stay with his parents in Hyannis Port until the Georgetown house we’ve leased is ready. Joe is delighted. “It’ll be a relief to have someone smart around here to talk to.”

Jack flies to Washington for four days each week and back to the Cape on Friday. As soon as he arrives, he tosses his bag into our bedroom, sits down for a few minutes, then heads off for a swim, a round of golf, a sail.

“It’s like being married to a whirlwind,” I say to Joe one afternoon. We sit together on the porch watching Jack cross the lawn toward the shore.

“Go with him,” Joe says. “Keep a man company.”

It feels like too much to explain that if Jack doesn’t invite me along, he’s saying he might not want me to ask.

On Sundays, there’s a makeshift togetherness. We go to church, walk the beach, and stroll into town. Jack reads The New York Times Book Review and circles titles he wants to read. As we talk about those books, authors, and ideas, I feel him move closer to me. The night before he flies back to Washington, he’ll touch my face, my body in bed. He’ll kiss me. We seem to become more visible to each other when he’s on the verge of leaving.

“I’ll miss you,” I say.

“I’ll be back soon.” That bend in his voice I love.

Monday again. He’s gone.

During the week, after dinner with Rose and Joe, I sit on the porch and smoke, watching the dusk soak into the beautiful lawn rushing down to the beautiful sea. The sky is molten, the dark comes fast. Sitting there, I think of France—Grenoble, Paris, the Seine. The dream of an old life—the thrill of freedom, otherness, a place away. The clock inside chimes ten. I stub my cigarette out and empty the ashtray into the hostas. Rose doesn’t like that I smoke. She says it’s not good for a young woman’s health or the health of a baby.

“There’s no baby yet,” I say.

“But there will be,” Rose says. “You mustn’t worry.”

“I’m not.”

Once upon a time there was a boy who loved heroes and a girl who married him and found herself in a too-small box of a housewife life.

It will be different. I tell myself this. Soon.

In November we move into 3321 Dent Place, the house we’ve rented in Georgetown. In the mornings, I make breakfast and coffee. I trim the edges when I burn the toast. Jack blows through the newspaper, skimming headlines. Then he’s out the door.

I make lists to anchor the day.

- Dry cleaners—drop off Jack’s suits

- Pick up meat from the butcher

- Take a walk

- A longer walk

- Find a new rug

On warmer days, I walk into the city. I miss my job. I’ve heard rumors the paper is going to be sold to the Post.

“I enrolled in a history class today,” I tell Jack one night at dinner.

He looks up. “Georgetown?”

“The school of foreign service.”

“Why there?”

“The others don’t accept women.”

His brow wrinkles for a moment. “That’s nuts,” he says.

I still haven’t registered to vote. I’d gone to a charity tea that morning for the Senate wives. I could feel those women stare like I was something of a curiosity, with my unruly hair and big hands, the bitten-down nails. When I left the tea, I walked to Georgetown, found the office of the registrar, and said to the woman in a navy suit behind the desk, “I need a place to put my mind, please.” She looked at me, and I explained I was only joking—well, sort of—and did she have a list of classes I could take. A few months ago I might have told Jack the story, and we would have laughed, but the space between us now feels stilted, tentative, like we’re playing at this marriage life but still too new to the script and props that seem to be ours.

He asks me to translate two passages for a speech. “Voltaire and Rousseau,” he says.

“I’d love that, yes.”

We start to eat. I cut off a piece of steak. He reaches for his water glass.

“Is the meat too dry?” I ask.

“It’s fine.”

A killing word. Fine.

Through the kitchen window, night again now. Our reflections in the glass turn back on us.

Winter rolls into spring. He works later hours. “That time of the year,” he says. To soften the loneliness, I hurl myself into readings for my history class and short trips to Merrywood to ride. I find a new rug, a few pieces of furniture, a lamp, and two oil paintings.

He appears in the living room one night with bills in his hand.

“I’m not going to tell you it doesn’t grow on trees,” he says.

I’m sitting at the table, my notebook open with a paper I’m writing. He is angry, his eyes like wood, waiting for me to respond. And say what? How has this happened? What exactly has happened? When I don’t say anything, he moves toward the door; the room feels suddenly erased.

This isn’t what I want.

At the door, he turns and holds up the bills. “Well?” he says.

“I’m not going to defend a rug,” I say, “or a small painting.”

“Two.”

“Only one rug.”

“Two paintings.”

I smile. “One’s a seascape. That shouldn’t count. A seascape is more of a window, and we both need a window or two cut in this stiff airless space we seem to have landed in, don’t you think?”

This stops him. Traces of anger in his eyes still, but those few words struck home.

He tells me then that a photo shoot has been arranged. Early next week. Our life in D.C.

“Time to turn up the BP,” he says. That’s what Joe calls it. Big personality.

The photographer is young. Orlando. I feel odd at first, self-conscious, but he is kind. He seems nervous himself.

Bobby shows up on the second day.

“Jack said you were bringing the Good Humor ice cream bars,” I say.

The camera shutter clicks, Orlando asking me to turn slightly to the right, tilt my head a fraction more. As the hours pass, I realize that with the camera trained on us, Jack and I laugh more, play more. It begins to be an idyll the young photographer captures: Jack and this woman named Jackie he has married, leaning on the balcony rail; Jack and Jackie walking in Georgetown; Jack painting a picture as Jackie looks over his shoulder; Jack playing football with Bobby while Jackie sits with Ethel, looking on.

“I’m perfecting the art of looking on,” I say to Ethel. Ethel looks at me blankly.

On the third day of Orlando, he photographs Jack at work. Jack, rising political star; Jack the intellectual, reading with his glasses on. The final series of shots, though, are me, the woman named Jackie, dressed in evening clothes, lighting a candle before a small dinner party, a brightness washing over her bare shoulders, intimate; light chisels the side of her face.

She is almost beautiful, I think weeks later when we see the proofs. That woman named Jackie the young photographer has made.

We’re invited to a dinner dance at the Shoreham Hotel. “Where we had our first real date,” I say, putting on my earrings. Jack sits on the edge of the bed, trying to pull on his sock.

“Damn it. Will my back ever work?”

“We can cancel.”

“No.”

But he winces reaching for his dinner jacket.

That night, he sits next to Priscilla Johnson. She used to work in his office.

“I never thought I’d get married,” I hear him say, “but I was thirty-six and, in politics, if you aren’t married by then, people start to think you’re queer.”

How dare he? Priscilla glances at me. I just smile at her as if, of course, this is the kind of thing my husband would say and I am just fine with it. I turn to the man on my right. I don’t look at Jack for the rest of dinner.

Later, we dance, my hand on Jack’s shoulder, his hand on my waist. We are like armatures in a figure-drawing class, our little wooden selves with wire joints.

The song ends. “Let’s go home soon,” I say.

“I’m going to get a drink. You want something?”

“No.”

Half an hour later, he’s still at the bar, talking to a tall blonde in a silver dress. She starts toward the exit, a glance at him over her shoulder. He puts down his drink and follows her.

I look away. I don’t want to see him walk out that door. No one seems to notice. Then they do. A current passing through the room. Priscilla Johnson, who sat with Jack at dinner, steps toward me, dark hair, pretty face, a compassion in her eyes I just want to pinch out. I pick up my clutch and leave. Everyone saw it happen. Everyone saw everything.

After four in the morning, he comes home; I’m awake in bed. He lies down, a column of space between us. Within minutes, he’s begun to snore. The emptiness of the room and the dark, moonlight throwing its tricks and promises across that new rug on the floor. I hate that rug now.

I let an hour pass. At dawn, I drive to Merrywood. I tack up the horse. We start at a trot, then a canter. I ride harder, faster. I want to feel the ground shudder through my body; I want that sense of the speed and the rage and the grief—not just for what I don’t have in this new life but for what I gave up.

I ride and the sun climbs into the sky, the world a rush of dizzying passionless green.

When I get home, he’s at his desk, working. He looks up, concerned.

“Where were you?” he says.

“You can’t think they don’t notice, Jack.”

“What?”

“Last night. You and Silver Dress,” I say, a crushing pressure in my chest. “You can’t think I don’t care, and you can’t think people will respect a senator who disrespects his wife.”

We barely speak for the next few weeks beyond the courtesies of two people who happen to share the same house. I leave his breakfast on the table. I stop calling to ask if he’ll be home for dinner or if his plans have changed. At first it seems to surprise him. But then he adjusts, like he thinks this must be what I want. Maybe he prefers it this way. No extra emotion to manage. He’s in his space. I’m in mine. We are two icebergs adrift, floating on, until one evening in June. I’ve just finished packing for a week with my mother in Newport. I walk into his study. He’s by his desk, bent over, his face a mix of fury and pain and despair. So odd, that look. It takes me a moment to realize he’s crying. He can’t bend down to pick up a jar of paper clips spilled on the floor.

“The fifth vertebra is entirely collapsed. Surgery—a lumbosacral fusion—will be the best option.”

“Will it work?” Jack says.

“There are risks. Because of the Addison’s.”

“But there’s a chance?”

The doctor nods. “Yes.” He pauses, then, “Without it, you may lose your ability to walk.”

I watch Jack’s face as the words hit.

October 1954. In the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, they prepare his body with medication for ten days. Afterward, they declare the surgery a success. But even before the fever spikes, I know something is wrong. His eyes are different, glassy. A blurred look.

“Are you all right, Jack?”

“Just woozy from the pain meds.”

I lie down beside him. Night. The lamp is off. Through the sheets, his skin burns, lips dry. I hold him gently; he seems so vulnerable, frail. He stirs. I should tell the nurse. I should tell them.

“I love you, Jack,” I say.

He opens his eyes—a weak smile. “And you’d think that would be enough to fix it.”

The nurses press into the room. They soak him in antibiotics, pack him in ice, but the heat in his body keeps rising. I call Joe and Rose. They come. Rose prays, the rosary clicking, prayers under her breath. Joe sits by the bed, talking to Jack as he floats in and out of consciousness. I kneel on the other side of him, my face on his hot open palm, tears sharp. I’m going to lose him. I don’t want to lose him.

The doctor comes, another nurse behind him explaining we have to leave.

“He needs a priest,” Rose cries. Joe draws her out into the corridor. Mrs. Kennedy. That’s the doctor. I kiss his forehead, skin like fire. Jack. Stay with me. Please, Mrs. Kennedy, you have to leave now. I suddenly realize they’re talking to me.

It’s days before he’s stabilized, another week before he can sit up in the bed. I bring him books, newspapers, magazines. I read aloud to him. Poetry and cartoons in The New Yorker. Movie reviews.

“That one sounds good,” he says.

“Sure, if you’re John Wayne’s grandfather.”

He laughs. I feed him apple crisp. He refuses to eat the gray slab of beef on the dinner tray. I slip ice chips into his mouth. One day when I come in, someone has taped a poster of Marilyn Monroe on the ceiling over his bed. He smiles at me wanly.

“Lem,” he says.

The first time I heard Lem Billings’s name was when Joe told the story of how Lem repeated his senior year at Choate so he could graduate with Jack. That Christmas, Lem showed up at Joe’s house with his battered suitcase and never quite left.

A few days later, I notice the poster has been turned and retaped so Marilyn’s legs are an upside-down V in the air.

“Lem again?” I say.

Jack rolls his eyes. “I’m bored as hell locked up in here.”

He’s been in the hospital for a month when he tells me he wants to write an essay. I listen, ask a few questions. After an hour, we decide it won’t be an essay but a book.

“Thank you,” he says that evening as I get ready to leave.

“That’s a funny thing to say.”

He shrugs. “This book will be good for me.”

I smile at him and sit back down. “Let’s start, then.”

“Tonight?”

“Why not?”

He’s less than 115 pounds. He still can’t walk, and I know that this is what he needs—brusque, practical, no sympathy—a task, all intellect and matter-of-fact.

“You tell me what you want to say, Jack. I’ll write it down. We’ll go from there.”