Chapter 52
We take the children to ski in Sun Valley in March, then to Antigua for Easter. We stay at Bunny Mellon’s house in Half Moon Bay.
Every evening before dinner, I swim from the edge of the cliff to the forked palm tree and back. Bobby doesn’t like it. Too close to dusk, he says.
I smile. “What are you afraid of? Sharks?”
He waits for me on the beach. When I turn my head to breathe, I can see his small dark figure, knees tucked up to his chest as he waits for the sun to go down and for me to come out. He meets me in the shallows with a towel.
“Thank you,” I say. He takes a step back. There are new faint splits in the bond between us, moments when his hand brushes mine. Or he’ll reach for my face without thinking. Then his fingers will pause, retract.
We don’t talk about it. It means nothing.
A few nights before we leave for Washington, he and I sit out on the porch after the others have drifted off to bed.
“You shouldn’t smoke,” he says. I keep smoking. He won’t say it again. Then it is just the silence and the two of us alone, awkward again, under the weight of the hot night and the terrible stars.
I’d kissed him earlier that evening. After my swim. I’d gone past the palm tree. He followed along the shore, carrying the towel. I got out at the end of the beach. We were far down, out of sight of the house. As he put the towel over my shoulders, I turned and kissed him. It startled him at first. Then not. I moved closer. No one else was there. His hands touched me, and it felt almost familiar—the touch—not awkward at all. No shock in it. Only his hands on my body, my neck, my face. I felt like I was no one. Like we were two people who had ceased to exist. In the dusk, his eyes were empty, pale as glass, apart from that cool hunger. Then his hand dropped, and I pulled the towel around me. We walked in silence back to the house.
“I used to love the night,” I say to him now on the porch.
“What did you love?”
“Walking around in it. In the summers, in Newport, I’d go down to the edge of the lawn and watch the boats and lightships on the bay. It felt magical, that glow of night water and lights in the distance. Sometimes I would just lie out there in my nightgown in the grass and watch the stars in their massive Van Gogh pinwheels.”
The porch ceiling fan spins, a low creaking sound through the heat.
“That’s a nice memory,” he says.
“It’s only memory,” I say. “You can’t expect too much of it.”
A week after I come home, a letter arrives from William Manchester, requesting a meeting to talk about the book he’s been contracted to write. About the death of the president. The few days before it happened, the few days after, the map of decisions and events.
“I need more time, Bobby. There must be others he can talk to.”
“He’s already started.”
“Writing? How can he have started?”
“The agreement—”
“I don’t want a book about that day.”
“There will be books,” Bobby says, his voice calm, pragmatic, like he’s talking to a child. “You need to meet with Manchester, then the Warren Commission. Then the record will be there.”
“And I can stop?”
“Yes.”
“And it will be over?’’
“Yes.”
Yesterday, at Hickory Hill, I played tennis with Father McSorley, Ethel’s priest. As we played, I asked Father McSorley if God would separate me from Jack if I killed myself.
“What about John and Caroline?” the priest asked.
I explained I feel like I’m no good to my children as I am right now.
“They’d be better off with Bobby and Ethel. They could have a normal life.”
“I don’t agree,” the priest said.
The score, I remember, was deuce. I served. The ball nicked the edge of the service box and flew out of his reach. My point.
“I need all of this behind me,” I say to Bobby now.
It’s spring again. Buds on the trees. How can it be spring?
The writer, William Manchester, is edgy, red-faced. Faint stains of sweat when he takes off his jacket. Nails bitten down to the quick.
He’s arrived with his tape recorder, his notebook. He has a kind of unkempt intensity. Feral. He was a Marine, I remember, as Bobby walks him into the living room.
“Please sit down, Mr. Manchester,” I say. “Would you like a cigarette?”
“Quit two years ago.”
I strike a match. “Are you sure?”
He hesitates, then accepts, and I relax. He is not a Mailer. He’s one I can manage.
“Are you going to put down all the facts,” I ask, “like who ate what for breakfast? Are you going to put yourself in the book too?”
He looks at me for a moment. “I’m not part of the story.”
“I think you know what I mean. How will you create an objective account?”
He places the tape recorder behind the plant on a side table.
“Have you started the tape?” I ask.
“Do you hear it?”
“No.”
He nods, a little smile.
As his questions begin, I realize he’s already lived through that day. He is asking the questions that matter.
Manchester is different.
“You seem to know most of the details,” I say. “What do you really need from me?”
“Everything you remember.”
He’s nervous. I can feel it. He is also looking for something in me no one else has wanted to see. I remember Bobby telling me that Manchester was in the ground war at Okinawa, the island battlefields of Tarawa in 1943, from November 20 to November 23. Twenty years before Dallas, he was in the middle of death. Men next to him were killed. He’s been spattered by blood. Like me, he knows what it is to be the one who survives.
“Mr. Manchester.”
“William.”
“Yes,” I say, but I won’t use his first name. “You were in World War II, like my husband.”
A veil across his eyes draws closed.
“Did that change you?” I ask.
He shrugs. “You see things differently. Afterward.”
“You mean you can’t stop seeing it.”
“Yes.”
“That day in Dallas, Mr. Manchester, I see it over and over in my mind. Every night.”
“Tell me.”
It’s fascinating and also repellent—how he wants to get right inside that day, into the backseat of the car, those eight seconds. He wants me to take him into that gap of time when time blew apart. He wants to feel every moment of slow-motion horror, the shock of the sound that threw me right out of the world, the metallic wash in my mouth I could taste for days after.
“What about the film stills?” he says. He pulls out the photographs of the woman crawling over the back of the car. The Zapruder images. I can’t look at those pictures. He spreads them on the coffee table. I pretend to look. I know I’m the woman in the photographs, but I have no recollection of doing the things they claim I did.
I shake my head. “I stayed right with Jack. That’s what I remember.”
“There must be more underneath,” he says.
He’s gaining confidence, his tone more aggressive. He pours another drink and sets it in front of me. Don’t drink it, I think, watching the sprawl of color over the ice cubes as they melt. He is more like Mailer than I thought.
- Then you climbed onto the back of the car.
- I don’t remember that.
- What happened next?
- That’s all I remember.
- You don’t remember climbing onto the back of the car?
- Is that what happened? They keep telling me I did that.
- Yes.
- I don’t think I did that.
- You were asked “why” shortly after, and you said you were going after a piece of the president’s skull.
- I don’t think I said that.
- Or were you trying to get out of the car?
I feel myself shake my head. White sunlight. Heat. The sound of the sky blown apart. The writer stares at me, ruddy cheeks, relentless eyes, focused to the point of being cruel.
Once upon a time, there was a woman in the backseat and a man beside her she was trying to pull down.
If she had been stronger. If only she’d been able to.
“What else do you want, Mr. Manchester?”
I could tell him that, recently, I’ve begun to wonder if those are in fact the details that matter or if what really matters is how the dog, for example, is still waiting for Jack to come home. Circling the rug by the door, the dog has paced one edge of that rug bare. What matters is the smell of the tack of that riderless horse, the buck and the fight. What matters is how Jack looked at me once, on a street corner in Georgetown, a year before we were married. He looked at me and I felt my soul wash open.
If I trusted this man, I’d explain the danger in the hours of night silence—not only the grief but what might have happened differently and who might have killed Jack. Was it really Oswald? Only Oswald? Killed now too, so we can’t ask him. What about the rumblings I catch sometimes, about Johnson, the CIA, more than one shooter? Sometimes I wonder what Bobby really knows. Does he tell me everything? Why would he keep things from me? What is he afraid I would do?
This all pushes up in me at once. I look from Bobby to the writer, then back again. My mind unspools. Like a film cut and spliced. I look again at the creep of sweat on the writer’s shirt. I should stop this now, stand up, ask him to leave.
“What else do you want, Mr. Manchester?”
“The truth,” he says—that smile not awkward now but hard, predatory, in this theater of a living room where we’ve been thrown together.
I give him everything then, the underside of those days in November, every limbic and intimate detail. The story I’ve told a hundred times since it happened, but never this way. I have never given away so much, to anyone.
That day it was the coolness of the tunnel I wanted—I wanted to whisper to you—in the blinding white heat of Dallas, I wanted totell you how much I craved the dark of that tunnel ahead. I wanted those shadows to wrap my face, my hands, to wrap you in with me.
I wanted to tell you that this is where forever lives—in the wanting. This is where life turns godlike.
I wanted to whisper to you that day in the open sweltering car that the dark ahead was what I was waiting for. Your hands and your mouth in that dark. I would steal across the seat and surprise you with a kiss.
Then the sky cracked. How fast it can happen. Like chalk off a slate. The sound again. No blood at first. Then it’s everywhere. The roses on the seat are the wrong color. And a woman in the car, his head blown apart in her lap, pieces she’s trying to keep held together, his beautiful mind all over her.
One mind unlike any other.
You are like no other.
When I surface again, the living room is filled with smoke. My drink is empty, the pitcher of daiquiri nearly empty as well. We’ve been at this for hours, and the writer is looking at me, his madman eyes not darting anymore, not uncertain or restless, but fixed, exultant.
“Who helped you into the car?” he asks. “Who was seated where? Do you have a recollection of the speed?”
He knows these things. Why does he need me to say them?
“What about Mr. Hill?” he asks.
“Clint?”
“Where was he?”
It’s a strange power the dead have—not to cross over or enter the physical sphere but to step down on the heart.
“What were the last words he said to you, Mrs. Kennedy—your husband, the president, do you remember what he said?”
Take off your sunglasses, Jackie, so they can see you.
Turn on the lights. I want them to see you.
Say, maybe I can take you for a drink someplace?
Don’t tell me you’re a romantic, Jack, I teased you once.
You shook your head and grinned. Nope. An idealist without illusions.
“You’re not going to answer?” the writer says, almost sneers. He seems annoyed.
“No,” I say.
“Let’s go back. Once more. Tell me again what you remember as the car was moving toward the tunnel.”
Over a year ago, your last winter, I watched you walk out on the South Lawn with Charlie. The snow was up to your knees. You’d throw a stick, and the dog would fly after it, dig that stick from the snow, then rush back to drop it at your feet. It went on for half an hour. Just this. You throwing the stick, Charlie fetching it back, the stark and gentle winter lawn, bare trees, and the dog moving through the snow. That chromatic light. I watched you from the window, wanting only to stay there, watching you, in that forever of an ordinary moment.
“The tunnel, Mrs. Kennedy?”
My mind snaps back.
Everything and nothing. The shade of the tunnel, how much I craved that dark—it was so hot—but we’ve already been over that, I’ve already told them all how it felt like the sun was stripping our faces. I had my sunglasses on. You told me to take them off. Then there was that sound, and the sky tore.
“Mrs. Kennedy, is there anything else you’d like to tell me?”
The smell of salt, your hair blown around in the wind, sunlight on your skin.
“Is that all?”
The way you said my name.
“Thank you, Mr. Manchester,” I say as I see him out.
“Never again,” I tell Bobby after the door is closed.