Chapter 50
No photographs of him. Not yet. I still can’t bear to see his face.
I lie upstairs in the house in Georgetown with books, cigarettes, magazines. Everyday sounds unfold around me. Provi and Nanny Shaw getting the children dressed, my children, their little sweaters and coats, Caroline’s bag packed for school. I want to be with them. But I’m still too far off to the side.
I regret that flimsy trope of Camelot already. So desperate. Saccharine. You would have hated it. Even if you did like the song. I should have chosen something heroic, about greatness, strength, risk—something to do with the Greeks.
In the afternoons, I let the room grow dark. I watch how the last of the daylight retreats and the dusk begins to rise, the room by increments destroyed.
At first there’s a constant stream of visitors. I keep thinking I’ll be happy to see them.
Joe Alsop, Betty Spaulding, Ben and Tony Bradlee. I tell them the story.
I should have done it differently, I say. Turned sooner, after the first shot.
I’ve said the same words so many times, and each time, I feel closer to saying it for the last time. Each time I feel something lighten inside me. But an hour later, the dark of it is back.
If only I’d looked right instead of left
If only I had pulled him down, the second shot would not have hit
If I’d been paying more attention
If I had not been complaining in my head about the sun
If I hadn’t been wanting so much, the cool promise of the tunnel ahead, the green of the park beyond.
And why red roses in Dallas? Everywhere else they were yellow. I should have known then.
Bobby comes. He has breakfast with the children and brings Caroline to school. He comes again at the end of the day. He reads to the children and puts them to bed. He tucks them in and teaches them prayers they did not learn. Then he comes to find me.
“How are you?” he asks.
Everything hangs by a thread. The world, I could explain, is split. Terrifying. Simplified. Every night I lie down with fear and a clarity so sharp it cuts behind my eyes. Jack was killed by American violence, he called it that once, the hatred that built this country.
“We’re soaked in it, Bobby,” I say, “this violence we pretend we’ve outrun.”
I tell him again, detail by detail, the story of what happened. Like Scheherazade. Each night extending into morning. Only each night, here, the story is the same.
“I have to tell it until it is out of me,” I say.
We lie on the bed, fully clothed. He has taken off his tie. We are close, his hand on my face, fingertips moving lightly. He does this sometimes, touches me without seeming to realize. It is not sexual or intimate but like he’s trying to remember what touch feels like.
Through the window, the moon.
We talk about the library and about some papers I need to sign. I ask about Ethel and his children. I tell him how I want a Christmas in Palm Beach with lights and stockings, like every Christmas, where John and Caroline can ask the questions they always ask: How big is my present? How many will there be? At the same time, I don’t want Christmas at all. Then he leaves and everyone is gone. Even the room is gone. The bureau. The bookshelves. The bed. All that remains is the window.
Sometimes after midnight, in the blue dark with my cigarette smoke, I will say Jack’s name. The one hard syllable carries. I call to him quietly as though he might come back to me.
Bob McNamara sends over two portraits of Jack, with a message saying he’d like me to keep one as a gift and he will keep the other. He’s asking me to choose. As I look at the two paintings, it gets harder to remember Jack in my mind, to see, for example, his face as it was that day I walked in on his bath a year ago wearing only my boots and the long riding shirt. How intimate it was—the surprise in his face—one of those small nothing moments in a marriage where everything happens.
I leave the portraits propped outside my bedroom door. I’ll ring McNamara tomorrow, thank him, and explain that for now I need to return them both.
That night, John comes into my room with a lollipop, looking for his toy train.
“In the basket in your closet, darling?”
“Not there.”
“Downstairs in the kitchen?”
“No.”
There’s a stain of lollipop around his mouth. I am suddenly exhausted.
“Time to brush your teeth, my love. Go do that, then come kiss me good night.”
“My train.”
“I’ll help you look in the morning.”
He studies me for a moment.
“I promise,” I say.
Satisfied, he trots out but stops in the doorway, looking at something around the door. The paintings, I realize, as he takes the lollipop out of his mouth and leans to kiss the canvas.
“Good night, Daddy,” he says.
Days slip by. The sunlight tidal. It creeps in, floods the room, recedes.
It feels bizarre, even cruel, how the world continues.
What did you know, before it happened?
You didn’t want to go to Dallas. You could feel it, couldn’t you? The hatred lying in wait. They talked you into going. They said everything would be fine.
How much has been lost for the sake of that word—fine?
Someone is home. John and Nanny Shaw. I hear his small voice. Footsteps below. I should get up and go downstairs. It’s cold—the should.
Nighttime again. The children stand at the foot of my bed. They want to kiss me good night. Sweet, pinched faces, miles away.
Still Bobby comes.
Beloved.
Familiar.
“How are you?” he says, just like always.
The world is hardly there.
“What can I do for you, Jackie? What do you need?”
I need Jack.
I need everything back the way it was. Even the things that infuriated me, the things we had not yet dealt with. I miss them now, desperately. What else could I possibly need?