Chapter 18
Fall 1955
I’m in the living room in Hyannis Port with Bobby and Jack as they talk about trouble in the South. A Chicago boy, visiting relatives near the Mississippi Delta, was murdered for whistling at a white woman. Two men came by his great-uncle’s house, dragged the boy out, beat him, torched him, drowned him in the river. When he was found, a cotton-gin fan laced with barbed wire had been wrapped four times around his neck to weigh him down.
“Fourteen years old,” Bobby says.
“It’s another country down there,” says Jack.
“If it was, it wouldn’t be your problem.”
“What those men did, it’s unthinkable,” I say.
They both look at me, and for a moment it’s startling—how different they are, their faces, expressions. Jack is cool, surveying, calibrating. Bobby’s eyes, though, are just so bright, an icy fire and an uncommon depth in them I’m not expecting to see.
“Story’s everywhere now because of the photographs,” Bobby says. “A close-up of the boy’s face. Mangled. Another of his mother at the funeral home. She chose open casket.”
“And the men were acquitted,” says Jack.
“Sure. In a Southern trial.”
I’ll remember this conversation months later, when I read an interview with Rosa Parks where she talks about how the real reason she didn’t get up from her bus seat that day was because she couldn’t stop thinking about that murdered boy and his mother who insisted on an open casket so the world could see what had been done—that boy named Emmet Till.
“How do you think it will end?” I ask Bobby when Rosa Parks is arrested for a second time, in early 1956.
“This is only the start,” Bobby says.
“Do you think Jack sees it that way?”
“He’s going to have to.”
I don’t say anything then. I’m curious what, if anything, he’ll add.
But he changes the subject. “How’s the ankle?”
I smile. “I’m afraid that sprain was the end of my touch-football career.” I don’t tell him I’m pregnant. Jack and I agreed not to tell anyone until I see the doctor again, but the secret has forged something new between us, that giddy and tenuous promise—a baby due later this year.
The tone of the meetings has changed. Less casual. More formal strategizing. Endorsing Adlai Stevenson for president, Jack manages to get Stevenson’s top aide, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., as an ally. The rumor is that Adlai is considering Jack as a possible running mate. By April, the meetings at our house in Georgetown are day in, day out—in our living room, in our kitchen, on the front stoop, on the stairs. Meetings after work and over lunch. The men leave the toilet seats up. Their crumbs litter the rug, and their drinks mold rings on the end tables. Once, after a shower, I walk out of the bathroom into a knot of men leaning against the wall in the upstairs hall, the air thick with the smoke of Havana H. Upmann cigars. Silent, they stare as I pass through them like a gauntlet, my body wrapped in a towel, the little bulge of my belly, a second towel around my hair. I walk into the bedroom and shut the door.
One Saturday in Hyannis Port, Jack and Teddy are down by the shore, messing around with the boat, trying to set the rigging for a sail. I stand with Bobby, watching them as Jack barks orders and Teddy fumbles around, doing it not quite right, or not the way Jack wants.
“Hey, Jackie,” Jack calls. “I left my jacket up at the house, can you get that for me? Don’t let that line go, Ted.”
“I’ll get the jacket,” Bobby says to me. “You stay here.”
I smile. “I’m pregnant, not an invalid.”
“Jack’s really happy,” he says as we walk up. “He talks about that baby all the time.”
“He wants me at the convention.”
“You should come.”
“Chicago in August, with a baby due in October?”
“Ethel will be there.”
“Oh, Bobby, your wife is an ace at being pregnant.”
He looks embarrassed.
“Do you think Jack really wants the vice presidency?” I say as we reach the porch steps.
Joe is there. “Don’t ask for my opinion on that,” he says.
“I wasn’t, Joe.”
“I don’t know why the hell he’d squander political capital to be runner-up. They’ll all lose to Eisenhower anyway.”
“We’re just getting a jacket, Dad,” Bobby says.
Joe follows us into the house. “I can’t imagine it’s been nice for you, Jackie, having them all underfoot when you’re trying to rest up for my grandchild.”
I laugh. “If this were a convenient campaign for you, Joe, would you be so concerned?”
“Schlesinger says Stevenson likes what he sees,” Bobby says. “We’ll let it play out.”
“And blow his chances for the real race?” Joe says.
“Jack’s being smart about the vice presidency, Dad. He’s not bragging like Humphrey or going around puffed up. Just the possibility of being named VP gets him into the center ring.”
Joe pretends to consider this, but he’s never put much stock in what Bobby brings.
“It’s going to be Jack,” says Bobby.
“I hope it isn’t,” I say.
“Why? Jack wants this.”
I smile. “To be second?”
At the convention in Chicago in August, heat ripples off the pavement. Over ninety degrees in the shade. I attend a champagne party for the campaign wives and overhear Perle Mesta complain to another woman she can’t believe Jack Kennedy’s wife would be such a beatnik as to show up without stockings. My feet and legs are swollen from the heat at the session where Jack nominates Adlai Stevenson as the Democratic candidate. I sit at the edge of the crowd. A hush comes over the convention hall as Jack speaks. His voice has begun to exert a new pull. My hands rest on my belly, marking the occasional slight push of the baby under my palm. I’ve learned to distinguish the turn of thehead, the kick of a foot, what’s knee, what’s shoulder.
Estes Kefauver, not Jack, is selected to be Stevenson’s running mate.
“You’re disappointed,” I say to Jack in the hotel afterward as we pack. “But you didn’t really want the vice presidency, did you?”
He shakes his head. “Dad told me I was wasting it. It just burns that he was right.”
On the flight back to Hyannis Port, he is brooding, restless. He sits with Bobby and his closest aides, the Irish trio: Larry O’Brien, Kenny O’Donnell, Dave Powers.
“I’m going to get out of town for a while,” Jack says. “A quick trip. I’ll see if Teddy will come with me.” He’s talking to them, but this is his way of breaking news to me that I might not want to hear.
“What about the baby?” I ask later, once we’re back in the house alone.
“That’s October. It’s only August.”
“I’ll miss you,” I say.
“It’ll be a quick trip.”
He’s putting me off. He’s angry about the convention. I should let it go.
“I don’t want you to leave,” I say.
He is sifting through papers. His hands stop for a moment, gray eyes cool. “Don’t.”
A few days later, he’s gone. I leave for Newport.
“What was he thinking?” my mother says. “Leaving you alone only weeks before the baby’s due.”
“The convention was hard for him.”
“Well, it’s all been hard for you.”
I’m looking at a magazine of paint colors and nursery designs. Maybe I shouldn’t have chosen yellow. Maybe I should have done things differently.
“I know you think the trouble with me, Mother, is that I don’t play bridge with my bridesmaids.”
She doesn’t answer right away, then, “I don’t actually think the trouble is you.”
It’s my mother I cry out for that August morning when I wake to shooting pains in my lower belly that radiate down my legs. The pain is unbearable. A rush of water—pinkish, then darker.
Hours later, I surface in the hospital. Bobby sits by my bed. The room is very white, his face cut against that whiteness, concern in his eyes, the blue intensity hazed by something new. I try to pull my mind out of the heavy sleep. I notice he’s holding my hand. Something is wrong.
“Where’s my baby?”
He shakes his head. “We almost lost you.”
“The baby?”
“No,” he says. Then I know. I don’t want him to say it.
“Where’s my mother?”
“She’ll be right back.”
“Where’s Jack?”
“We haven’t been able to reach him yet.”
It’s right there, on the edge of me—the question about the baby, where it is, that tiny body, tiny self, what happened, how it happened—but the sadness in his eyes is too cutting, too awful and intimate. I need a glass of water. That’s all.
“We almost lost you,” he says again, moving the chair closer to the bed.
“A girl?”
He nods.
“Arabella,” I say. “That’s the name I wanted. I knew it was a girl.”
His eyes fill, and I look away. Outside, starlings in the trees. Clouds and sky in pieces, caught between the branches and the flourish of summer leaves. Everything so bright and violent. Just looking at the green hurts my eyes.
“We haven’t been able to reach the senator,” I hear Bobby tell the doctor an hour later. I know what he’s doing. Trying to establish a story before another takes root. “We’ve sent messages through his secretary, but the boat he’s on has no ship-to-shore.”
A lie.
Bobby glances up as if he hears me thinking it.
“I’m sure there’s an explanation, Jackie,” he says after the doctor has left and we’re alone. I’m sitting up in the bed, pillows propped behind my back. The wall feels hard against my skull. I need that sense of hardness, that ground. Bobby is just looking at me. Do I really have to break it down for him? The baby is gone, so in Jack’s mind, there’s no reason to cut his trip short.
“How is Ethel?” I ask.
“Fine.”
It ends there. Ethel is due within a week. And Jack’s sister Pat has just given birth to a little girl named Sydney. Bobby is still looking at me, a compassion in his face that swerves too close and makes me feel. I don’t want to feel.
“It’s just a mistake, Jackie,” he finally says.
There’s no mistake,I want to say. The affairs are not a mistake. The coolness, the jokes, the flip remarks that shut me down. Not a mistake. Nor is his fickle desire for me, proprietary at times, like a wife is an article he wants, as long as that wife is strong, put-together, sexual, witty in a passionless way, as long as she keeps herself intact and doesn’t need him—because when she’s wanting or vulnerable or weak, he has to get out, get away. He can’t be there when she’s breaking.
Bobby’s eyes search my face.
You don’t stay with someone because they hurt you, I could say. You stay for the slight and mythical promise of a dream that once meant so much you were willing to trade a different future for it. You stay for what you gave up.
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this, Bobby.” To his credit, he doesn’t ask what “it” is—the loss of the baby, the marriage, or some other loss not yet taken into account. He sits with me while I cry. He stays that night, late. He arranges everything. The service, flowers, funeral card. Everything.
“Good night, Jackie,” he says as he is leaving. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Thank you.”
“I’ll always be here for you,” he says, glancing away like he feels foolish for having said it.
I smile. “So now you’re the one I’d put my hand in the fire for.”
Years later, I will remember that moment between us, and every time I remember, I’ll see some different aspect, a look in his eyes I didn’t register at the time, something desperately earnest in the silence, a little rushed as he looked away. Years from now, I will understand how much more complex that evening was than I gave it credit for. In the moment, all we see is what we expect to see.