Chapter 55
The sun rises, then sets. The last of the leaves fall. The trees are bare, waiting for snow. Smoke from a chimney, fires snap, lights turned down at bedtime, then snuffed out. The windows darken and the sky is bright with stars—their disordered burning without design, stars flung around like dice.
Christmas in Aspen. Skiing with Bobby and the children in Vermont. In February, I go to Puerto Marques, then rent a house in Hobe Sound. I read the papers. The assassination of Malcolm X; the attacks on King and flights of protesters marching from Selma to Montgomery. They are met by police, tear gas, and nightsticks; they’re beaten at the bridge.
“This isn’t someone else’s country,” I tell Bobby.
In New York that spring, I go out with a string of escorts—intellectual, witty, gentlemanly gentlemen. I sleep with one or two of them once or twice. Even if it were more than that, it would mean nothing. These men are friends. I talk and laugh with them. I trust them. Only one feels more serious—the architect Jack Warnecke. Bobby warns me it’s too soon.
“Too soon?”
He doesn’t answer.
“Are you jealous?” I say, teasing. “You, with your nine children, and your lovely live-wire wife, with her cheery faith in you and God and all things Kennedy. Bobby, you couldn’t be jealous.”
He’s been moody recently, brooding over Johnson, who’s taken the high road on civil rights that Bobby had staked for his own. On national TV, Johnson pledged support to King and the marchers at Selma. He called for the passage of a new voting-rights bill. All things Bobby would have done.
“It’s good Lyndon’s taking a stand,” I tell him. “What matters is that the bills get passed.”
He doesn’t answer.
Dropping ice into a glass, I say, “Ethel doesn’t need people going around saying you’ve been seen leaving my apartment in the early morning.”
“Ethel’s fine.”
But it comes out hard. The fine.
David Ormsby-Gore calls from England to ask if I’ll attend a memorial ceremony in May. The queen wants to dedicate a tract of land at Runnymede in Jack’s name. I tell David I’ll think about it, but only because he’s the one asking.
“Harold Macmillan could speak in my stead,” I say.
“I don’t know,” David says. A pause. I remember then: the Profumo affair. Macmillan’s secretary of state, John Profumo, lied about a scandal and was caught in the lie, and though Macmillan had done nothing wrong, the incident drove him to resign. There was a young model involved and a Soviet attaché.
“Harold wrote me a wonderful letter last February,” I tell David on the phone. “Fifteen pages about his time in the war. I tried to write back, but nothing I wrote made sense.”
“Will you say just a few words at the ceremony?” he asks again.
“Will you have Macmillan speak as well?”
“I’ll have to see what I can do,” he says.
“Oh, David, please do a little more than that.”
“So you’ll come, Jackie?”
I smile. “I’ll have to see what I can do.”
Soon it will be summer again. When I can bike and walk and swim and drop my mind. I want to watch our children in the waves, limbs baking brown, legs longer this year, running down the beach. This summer, as they wade farther out, I will watch the light shift across that line of sea and sky, that taut edge of the horizon you live behind now.
Lee throws a party for me.
“But there’s no occasion, Pekes,” I say.
“A party is the occasion,” Lee says. “Just a teeny tiny dinner dance for less than a hundred. I’ve picked out a dress for you. You can’t wear that old yellow thing you’ve worn for every single dinner since you moved to New York.”
“I didn’t wear it for every single one.”
“You did.”
“I didn’t.”
“People are starting to notice, Jackie.”
It feels like a slap.
“We have to be forgiven,” I say, “for things we’ve done since Jack died.”
Lee looks at me. “We?”
She thinks I mean Bobby. That he is always with me or near me. People have talked.
“Things like wearing the same dress, Lee. That’s all I meant.”
I don’t tell her that when Aristotle Onassis was in town two weeks ago, he invited me for dinner. Very last minute. But I went. I didn’t wear that old yellow dress. I wore a different dress.
Averell Harriman is my escort the night of Lee’s party. Stas welcomes us at the door. He and Lee seem to be patching things up. Bobby is there. He catches my eye, then looks away. It’s a beautiful party. That’s what Lee does—she trafficks in beautiful things. Everyone is kind. They mean well, I know, even as part of me has gone off to sit in the corner, a casual absence. We move from course to course, cycle through predictable topics of conversation. My practiced smile. I laugh when cued. The evening is like water rushing by.
Someone mentions how well I look.
You don’t get past it,I almost say. You don’t even really move on. The world moves on. But the wrenching loss remains. With no logic and no lexicon. You live that loss again and again.
I fly with Bobby, Teddy, and the children to England for the dedication at Runnymede. On the plane, Bobby asks about the speech I wrote. It’s not long, I tell him. Just some remarks about how English literature influenced Jack as no other dimension of his education did. How he loved history. He believed that history was alive in the present, continually shaping the course of events.
Bobby nods, his face reflected in the plane window. A palpable remove between us now, cool. I don’t bring it up. I miss him. I miss the closeness, though I have no right to.
By the makeshift stage in the field at Runnymede, thousands have gathered in the bright-soaked meadow where the Magna Carta was signed, that first written document that sought to balance power with law. Justice, fairness, the rights of the people. Tree-blossom stuff is adrift on the air.
Macmillan speaks first. His calm voice floats over the field. He wrote to me soon after Jack died about being wounded in the Battle of the Somme. Shot, he fell and lay for hours among the dead. When his comrades came for him, they found him alive and took him from that place, but he was never able to escape the sense that it was wrong for him to live and leave the dead behind. He could not escape the sense that he had failed them.
“But this,”he had written, “what has happened to you and (in its way) to all of us. How can we accept it? How can we explain it? Why did God allow it?…Can there really be a God?”
Those words rise in me now, and I suddenly understand I cannot get up and say the brief remarks I’d planned. I cannot stand on that platform overlooking the field where King John met the barons and signed the Magna Carta. Neither side kept to the terms. Less than a year later, they met again in war, and King John was killed by those same men. Because violence is tidal. Violence does not end. It spills over and soaks, one generation into the next.
I lean over to Bobby. “I can’t do this.”
“You can.”
“No.”
It’s not that I’m too weak, I could explain. If anything, it’s the opposite. There is simply too much of me now. This jagged, unbridled intensity.
“Maybe that intensity is what you always were,” Onassis remarks when I tell him about that day at Runnymede. Early June. He’s come to New York. He’s invited me for dinner again, and here we are.
“I couldn’t bear to stand in that field and say beautiful things when all I can see now is how hate, and the violence it creates, is always there.”
“That isn’t all that’s there.”
I tell him about an argument I recently had with Bob McNamara over Vietnam. McNamara’s been quietly pushing me to align with Johnson.
“Of course they want your support,” Onassis says.
“Johnson takes credit for work Jack did on civil rights. It enrages Bobby. Then they ship more troops to Vietnam and blame Jack for his part. Which is unfair. Jack always felt that conflict could only end badly.”
Onassis nods, listening.
“There’s not a civilized nation in the world,” I say, “that talks about its civilizing mission as grandly as America does.”
The first-course plates have been cleared. McNamara and I did not leave on good terms after that argument. Two days later, he sent over a stuffed tiger as a gift for John. I’m making a watercolor of a tiger now to thank him but feeling somehow sick about it. Like I’m back on that stage, playing a role.
I dust a few crumbs off the tablecloth.
More and more often, Onassis seems to have reasons to be in the city. He stays at The Pierre. He’ll phone me a few weeks before. Mention he’s coming to New York on business. He’ll ask if there’s a night I might be free.
“I’ve brought something for you,” he says now.
“You shouldn’t do that.”
“It’s small.”
He withdraws a slim book from his jacket pocket. A collection of poems by the Greek poet Cavafy. “You’ve read him?” he asks.
“Only a few things,” I say. “Thank you.” I open the book. He tells me that much of Cavafy’s work has roots in the historical and mythological past, and while Cavafy believed in art for art’s sake, he often worked politics into his poems. Then, almost as an afterthought, Onassis remarks that pre-Socratic philosophers believed that the soul was born out of the sea, and the sea’s mist was the link between the earth and sun.
“I love that,” I say.
“I thought you would.”
“I’m planning to read Kazantzakis this summer.”
“Which book?”
“Report to Greco.”
He smiles. It says everything, the smile.
I put the Cavafy book into my bag as our entrées arrive.
“Are you happy in New York?” he asks.
“I can almost disappear.”
He laughs. A quick laugh. Alpha teeth. White and strong.
“You should come back to Greece,” he says.
Such a curious man. With his overtures. Presumptuous at times. But when he tells his stories, the room slips over my head.
Over crème br?lée, I mention the ongoing battle with the biographers, even Schlesinger and Sorensen. “Jack would hate what Sorensen’s done,” I say. “Too hagiographic.”
“Better than the alternative.”
“I suppose. Schlesinger has portrayed Jack as a Roman senator, cool, unemotional. I told him that was all wrong. Jack was more like the Greeks. He brought light to the dark. He made decisions with an eye to the long throw of time.”
And an eye to glory,I almost add. Like Achilles. That’s the comparison Jack would have wanted. Achilles or Odysseus. Neither, though, has ever felt quite right to me. I tell Onassis then that I sometimes think of the scene in The Iliad when Achilles murders Hector, the Trojan prince. For twelve days, out of grief and rage, Achilles drags the body around the walled city, and every night, after each desecration, the gods quietly restore Hector’s body. Heal his cuts, the broken bones and wounds. They rinse the dust from his skin.
“It’s how myth is made,” I say. “Destroyed, resurrected, destroyed, retold.”
Later I will feel like I talked too much, too freely. Why? Because he’s an outsider? Is that why?
“In the American papers,” he says, “everyone seems quite concerned about which invitations you accept and which you decline. They talk about you like you are their queen.”
“I do have to consider what Widow Kennedy can or should do.”
“Because there are other Kennedys with ambitions?”
“Bobby’s good to me,” I say. “And he is so good to John and Caroline.”
“He’s a noble man.”
A lie, I know. He doesn’t like Bobby. He never has.
“Are you going to Hyannis Port soon?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“Give him my best, please.” A slight smile around his mouth. Not kind.
“We were having such a nice time,” I say.
“I meant it in a perfectly nice way.”
“Please, Mr. Onassis, don’t be like everyone else and pretend.”
There was more we spoke about that night, but that, for me, was the note on which it ended.
The first night I spend at the Cape that spring, the house has the cold damp smell of winter trapped in wood. I throw the windows open.
Last night I dreamed of you, and in my dream, I was with you again, and you washed through my body like a wave.
Lessons I’ve learned since you died:
How to pack certain things away with precision—heartbreak, of course, grief and regret, but also anger—the kind you always told me I should bite back.
The rituals of summer. Cooking fires on the beach, lobster, corn, blueberries, and peaches. Early-morning swims and being barefoot all day long.
I read the book of Cavafy’s poetry.
On my birthday, I call Ted Sorensen.
“I miss Jack,” I say. “Even the stupid things that used to irritate me, like when he’d track sand into the house in the cuffs of his pants.”
“Can I take a ride over?” Sorensen asks.
“Please.”
He brings doodles Jack made during the missile crisis. Sheets of yellow lined paper with little pictures and words staggered among the drawings—Khrushchev, Soviet Submarines. On one page, the word Missile circled over and over.
“Before, we would’ve just thrown them away,” he says.
You loved him,I almost say, but it’s so obvious, I feel ashamed.
Sometimes I can feel those layers of other summers when you were here. Collateral moments—the warm green shadows and how the sunlight fell across your shoulders and your face. I could see you aging, but I’d still catch that unmistakable careless grace I always loved. Sometimes I see it still, even with you gone, even as the seasons change and new rituals begin to rewrite the hours, erasing you, as summer moves toward fall.
When I feel you close to me—your presence and the loss—I just wish I’d given more, said and trusted more. It’s like breathing in lightning, the want and the regret.
The man accused of shooting Mary Meyer is acquitted. It’s in the papers that August. A Black female lawyer took his case and argued that the man accused wasn’t the size of the suspect a witness had seen. Mary Meyer was shot twice, once in the head, once in the shoulder, by someone who knew how to push a bullet straight to the aorta; her mind went dark in an instant. Both shots were mortal. This detail, more than any other, haunts me.
I swim in the ocean, and my mind turns: Mary Meyer, two shots, a Black man fishing, the chiffon dress, its hem soaked with snow, drunk lovesick Mary wandering the White House lawn.
One evening, when the sky is bright, I take the children for a walk. The street is empty. John pulls at my hand while Caroline skips ahead. John stops, squatting down beside a puddle in the road.
“John, that’s dirty,” I say as he starts to reach for the water.
“No, Mummy, I want it. The moon.”
It strikes me then—a sudden feeling I almost don’t recognize. I am happy. That’s what it is, the feeling.
“You’re crying again,” says Caroline.
I pull my daughter to me, and John as well. I hold them both. John’s hands wrap my neck, but Caroline’s arms stay tucked by her side, her body like wood, that rigid sorrow. She’s holding her breath, holding everything in.
“It’s okay, sweetheart. Caroline, my love, it’s okay.” I feel her body give, a tiny sob in her throat. “He was our world, my love. That’s why we cry.”
That fall, I rent a house in Far Hills, New Jersey. Simple, clapboard, down a dirt road. Almost every weekend I drive out with the children to ride. Coming back into Manhattan late one Sunday, we get stuck in traffic. It’s after eleven when we finally reach 1040. John’s asleep in my arms, and as I walk in and turn on the hall light, I’m startled to notice how the apartment has become home. The old-world curtains, blue-and-white lamps, long shelves of books, the cherry-blossom screens. Near the window, my easel with a canvas. My eyes sweep the photographs: horses, dogs, the children, Jack.
On November 2, a young man named Norman Morrison sets himself on fire to protest Vietnam. I read about it in the papers the next day. I’ve had a fever, and I am still in bed. Morrison was a Quaker, the secretary of a Friends Meeting, and he set himself on fire by the river entrance to the Pentagon, forty feet below McNamara’s office. Not yet thirty-two years old. Three children. His baby daughter in his arms as he doused himself in gasoline and struck a match. As the flames caught his clothes, he set the baby on the wall behind him. A bystander swept her out of reach.
Below the article is an advertisement for a sofa and the caption Have your Danish with a martini, and there, what I don’t expect, a tiny news story: Mrs. John F. Kennedy ill with the flu.
Good Lord.
I think about Bob McNamara. I should call him about that man Morrison. In my gut, I know he was in his office when it happened. He would have stayed by the window and made himself see it.
The phone rings. It’s Bobby. A first draft of the Manchester book will be finished next month. They’re going to send a copy for me to read.
“I don’t want to read it,” I say. “It’s been two years, Bobby. I am just starting to breathe.”
Silence then.
“You read it,” I say. “You’ll know what we should cut.”
John’s birthday falls on Thanksgiving Day that year. I drive with the children out to New Jersey on Wednesday morning. The next day is Thanksgiving, then a dinner celebration for John’s birthday, gifts, cake, a song. Two days later, we celebrate Caroline’s. Driving back into the city, I decide that every year from now on, it will be this: the long Thanksgiving weekend, the three of us together, each of their birthdays celebrated on its actual day. Just this way.