Chapter 21
That spring, we learn Jack will be awarded a Pulitzer for Profiles in Courage, and we learn that I am pregnant. I want a baby so much. I’m afraid to trust the joy.
We go to the Paris Ball at the Waldorf Astoria. Marilyn Monroe is there on the arm of Arthur Miller, her body like a vase in her black-halter sequined dress.
“That woman is outrageously beautiful,” I say to Jack in the car afterward.
“She’s a wreck.”
I feel a wave of anger. “A wreck brave enough to stand by Miller during his McCarthy inquisition.”
“Investigation. Besides, they were already having an affair.”
“Does that make her less brave?”
We ride in silence. The car pulls up to a traffic light. Two more blocks to the hotel.
“Lee is leaving Michael,” I say.
“What?”
“He’s grown too dull for her. I think she’s going to run off with a Polish count. My sister, the princess. Does that seem surprising?” I look out the window. The air in the car is altered. The news has thrown him. Divorce. The light turns green.
I take him to see a house I’ve found on N Street NW in Georgetown. Three stories, Federal style.
“It leans a bit to one side,” I say as we walk over. “The stairs creak.”
“Sounds like me,” he says.
“It used to belong to Oatsie.” He’ll like that. Oatsie is Marion Leiter. She’s close friends with the British spy novelist Ian Fleming. Jack loved Casino Royale.
In the house on N Street, Jack seems smitten with an old doorknob. We leave the realtor and her assistant downstairs.
“I think this will be the nursery,” I say.
“We haven’t agreed to buy it.”
“You fell in love with the doorknob.”
He reaches for me then. He touches my waist. An unexpected tenderness. “I like this crooked creaking house you’ve chosen, Jackie.” He slides his hand around my back and draws me to him.
I’m with his parents in Hyannis Port in July when the phone rings. Yusha. Calling to wish me a happy birthday.
“I’d like a few more days of twenty-seven,” I say.
He was in New York the week before, he says. He dropped by Black Jack’s apartment.
“He didn’t look right, Jackie. He’s lost weight. He can’t keep food down.”
“He must have been drinking?”
“No, actually. That’s why I’m mentioning it. He wasn’t.”
I fly to New York and talk my father into going for tests at the hospital. I hold his hand as the doctor explains it’s late-stage liver cancer. Chemotherapy is the only option.
I call Lee.
“Too much jai alai,” I say, “scotch, and Pan Am stewardesses.”
Lee sighs. “Should I come home?”
“You should if you want to.”
“I want to if I should, Jacks. You’ll tell me, won’t you? You’ll know. Tell me when I should come, and I’ll be there.”
But I don’t know. My father fails so fast that by the time I reach the hospital after getting the doctors’ call, he’s gone. Only moments ago, they tell me. My name was the last word he spoke. Is that true? Or is that what they tell all the daughters who aren’t there in time?
Once, on a carriage ride through Central Park when Lee and I were young, ice cream dripped on our dresses and our Sunday gloves. Lee began to cry, afraid of what our mother would say when Black Jack brought us back, how angry she’d be. Lee sobbed. Our father couldn’t understand what she was afraid of. I tried to explain. He just threw back his dark head and laughed, his laughter so bold and free I felt my breath cut, and from then on, I understood that a glove was just a glove and what mattered was the decadent sunshine, the gorgeous midsummer patterns of sky and park and city, the heat and the green. What mattered was the sugar and cream dissolving on my tongue, the sweet sticky aftermath of that pleasure on our lips and wrists.
After the funeral, I tell Lee, “You should take what you want of Daddy’s things. All I want is the desk.” The desk is mahogany, French Empire style, with ormolu hardware and a slant front. “You can have everything else, Lee.”
“I don’t want anything,” my sister says.
When Jack leaves again for the campaign trail, I drive him to the airport. The air is humid still, and warm, but we are into the fall, and the slant of light has changed.
“Don’t overdo exercise while I’m gone,” he says.
“Exercise is good for me.”
“Just not too much.”
“Someone’s going to have to run after this baby.”
It makes him happy, every time I say that word.
“I feel like I’ve forgotten something,” he says, looking through the battered leather briefcase. He moves some papers into a folder, then snaps the briefcase closed.
“Just don’t forget to come home,” I say.
He leans in to kiss me at the door that leads out to the airstrip; I can feel his breath faintly cool, the white rush of the sky behind.
I stay in New York while he’s gone. I take long walks in the park. Every morning, I read the papers: Eisenhower sends in the 101st Airborne to protect nine Black children at a Little Rock high school; the Russians shock the United States by launching Sputnik, the first satellite, into space. I read Faith and History by the philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr. I cut a passage from The Observer to give to Jack when he comes home, a quote from the French filmmaker Jean Cocteau:
…what is history after all?
History is facts which become lies in the end; legends are lies which become history….
I watch the leaves turn, and I think about my father, how he will never meet my baby. Loving him was like trying to put my arms around the sun—I could never quite keep up with the speed of the loss, even knowing it was coming, too fast, too soon, and no matter what I did or how much I wanted, I would not be ready. There would be loose ends, always, for what I had not said, for what I could not bridge or hold or save.
Lee and I had decided there would be summer flowers strewn across his casket. Black-eyed Susans, cornflowers, lilies, too, for the heartbroken beauty of their scent. Fierce colors, wild blooms. And those summer flowers are what I hold in my mind as I let go to the rising pull of anesthesia the day before Thanksgiving.
“Please, let all be well,” I say quietly. “Let my baby be well, whole and safe and beautiful. Let all things be well.”
I will always look back on the day, November 27, 1957, as the happiest of my life. Jack bending toward me, our sweet baby girl in his arms, an expression on his face I’ve never seen—it kicks my heart over.
“How lovely she is, Jackie.” Light pours from his face toward the tiny being wrapped in a blanket in his arms, his hand cupped around her skull. He sits on the edge of the bed, flowers he brought on the table behind him, and it is just the three of us, alone—floating on a raft cut loose from the world. He will always look at our daughter just that way, like he needs to map each detail, each feature—the bond between them tensile, changeless, transcendent.
In the hospital room, her tiny face scrunches up. She opens her mouth to cry.
“Shhh,” he whispers. She quiets at his voice.