Chapter 60
When I see Onassis again, I understand that he has simply been there. Waiting. The sense of him emerging. He’s been a shadow in my life—an outline, mythical.
I remember something Lee said once. “For Ari, everything is a chess game. His patience is enduring.”
He’s offered his plane to fly me and the children to Palm Beach for Easter. I wonder how he knew our plans. Does it matter? He’s on his way to meet his daughter in Nassau. He talks to the children as the plane heads south. John, seven now, loves anything in flight. Ari brings him up to the cockpit to sit with the captain and work the controls.
Ari comes to sit with me. “How is Bobby?” he asks.
“Running for president. I don’t see him often.”
“He’ll win, I think.”
“If that’s what he wants, I want that for him.”
“So Bobby will win. And then what?”
There are gifts. He calls them little nothings. “Just trinkets that made me think of you,” he says. A diamond-and-ruby bracelet, a sapphire pin, a string of pearls.
In May, he invites me for a short cruise through the Virgin Islands.
Bobby has won Indiana and Nebraska, but the numbers aren’t conclusive enough to throw McCarthy out of the race. Bobby and a raft of other Kennedys fly to campaign for Oregon and California. I don’t go with them. Instead, I fly to St. Thomas and the Christina. After dinner, we sit on deck, our voices mixing with the smells and sounds of the dark, the play of the waves, the distant chain of lights that mark the islands.
“It’s like cruising through stars,” I say.
Ari laughs. “But not as beautiful as Greece.”
He’s smoking one of his Montecristo cigars. The gangster-style glasses that storm his face rest on the table between us.
“So when are you coming back to my island?” he asks.
“After the election.”
A momentary blind comes over his eyes. Then he smiles, and that hardness just as suddenly is gone.
The day I fly home to New York, Bobby loses the Oregon primary. I call him.
“If I lose California,” he says, “I’m out.”
“That’s silly. You’re not close to out.”
“I’m out if I don’t win California.”
“It’ll work,” I say. “I didn’t want you to do this, but I can see now it’s the right thing.”
“I don’t trust Onassis,” he says abruptly.
“He’s not a bad man, Bobby.”
“Tell that to the European press.”
“You’re saying I should make my decisions according to the press?”
“I’m saying Greece, since the coup, is a military dictatorship and Onassis has no convictions.”
“His convictions may not be political. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist.”
“He’s a danger, Jackie.”
The word stops me for a moment. Then I say, “You don’t mean he’s a danger to me, do you, Bobby?”
“That is what I mean.”
“You mean he’s a danger for you.”
“No,” he says. “It’s more than that.” But I struck a nerve. I can hear it in his voice. Does he really believe he’s protecting me? That he still needs to? I feel a rush of tenderness toward him, then it tightens.
He wins California. I stay up late on the night of June 4 to watch the final results come in. Then I go to bed. I’m tired, and he won’t give his speech until midnight West Coast time.
When the phone rings, I’m sure it’s him. The sound is sudden. I feel across the nightstand for the phone, lift the receiver.
“Hello,” I say.
“How’s Bobby?” a voice asks.
“Stas, is that you?”
“How is he?”
“He won!”
Good Lord, it’s four in the morning—couldn’t he have just flipped on the TV?
“No, I mean how is he?”
“He won California, Stas. Isn’t it wonderful?”
I’m still half asleep, shaken by the jolt of the ringing phone. I’m not quite caught up. Loud noises still tear into me. Stas knows this, and I wonder again why he’s calling when he could have just switched on the TV.
I can feel the silence on the line. Like something has been disconnected. The receiver is cool in my hand, the mouthpiece against my cheek. I watch the city lights play down the edge of the curtain. Like mercury falling. I wish I’d turned on the lamp before picking up. I wish there was no sign of that beautiful dancing light—its promise and its heart.
Don’t say anything. Don’t ask. Keep holding the receiver and the silence.
“Stas,” I say finally.
He tells me then.
Later, I’ll piece the details together—how that night, walking through the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel, Bobby was shot, once in the head, twice in the back; he just kind of slipped to the floor, the ground pulled out underneath him. Shouts, screaming, cries. Blood pooled from his head. Ethel fought through the crowd to reach him and, when she did, she pushed them all back to give him space and air.
Learning this particular detail, I do not want to imagine Ethel’s face.
I fly to L.A.
Chuck Spalding and Richard Goodwin meet me at the airport.
“I want it straight,” I say.
Bobby is in a tangle of medical equipment. Ethel lies over the bed, crying, her face across his legs. She is pregnant with their eleventh child. Teddy prays by the bed, on his knees. Other faces stand at the edges, ravaged. The same faces. It’s too familiar. Crushing, airless, the bright hospital light. I just want to stop, to drop to my knees next to Teddy, not to pray, just to feel my knees against that implacable linoleum floor, like the sense of hardness meeting hardness might be enough to push the dark down.
I stay for a while in the room, then step out into the corridor.
Richard Goodwin tells me that he and Ted Sorensen had been upstairs in the suite, watching the speech on TV. They turned it off and were about to head down to meet Bobby when they heard screaming from the hall, the sound of running. They turned the TV back on and watched it unfold on the screen.
I want to hear it, detail by detail, from every point of view. I want to feel it, know it, as if I’m waking up. I want to be there in the horrible glare. I want the full weight of it to cut me loose. The grief is immeasurable. A vastness I’ll never come to terms with or have the words to explain. I stand in the corridor outside the room where Bobby lies, hooked to machines that keep his chest rising and falling, his heart beating, though his brain is gone. No doctor will dare give the word to let him go. Ethel is stretched over him, Teddy still on his knees, with his bowed head and prayers.
At one point during the course of that day that goes on forever, Ethel glances at me across Bobby’s body that is no longer Bobby, and there’s an expression on her face—some question mixed in with the grief—that until the end of my life I will not know how to interpret. Then she stands up, touches Teddy on the shoulder, and draws him out of the room. For ten minutes, I am alone with him.
Then it’s midnight again, then half past, then one. His chest still moving up and down, machines whirring away. We are gathered around him—in our places, a tableau.
It’s time. No one says it. We all know. There’s a pressure, faint, like heat on my skin. Ethel is looking at me. I meet her eyes. It’s time. She nods, turning away, that impossible mix of agony and sorrow in her face as it caves.
1:44 a.m.
You have been the last dream of my soul.
Machines stop, his chest falls,
And it is done.
Mind, words, body, knowledge, dream.
Done.
When he died, you understand, that was the end, your beloved brother’s death the final stroke of yours. There was no incentive then. No legacy. No passing of the torch. All we sacrificed and fought for and believed in. What was left of my heart broke and that was it. We stayed there gathered around his bed. It was like living your death all over again, and I was one of them and at the same time already fading from their view, passing out of their reach, alone. I saw the fabric of it all—how carefully we’d tried to build it, tried to keep it, and now the dissolution—Ethel with her lovely faithful head bowed, the rest of them, their eyes cast down, tears paving their faces, and I was there and not there, I did not cry, not then, and they did not notice. We all just stood there, without seeing. Watching our lives turn into history.