Jackie

Chapter 66

There is a dream I have—often—of you. I dream that you come for me, but I hold up my hand.

Once, not really thinking about it, I mention the dream to John. It’s morning; he’s home from college for the weekend. We are in the kitchen. I tell him about the dream, how it recurs, how it haunts me, how abstract it is and how real it seems, how I keep dreaming it, month after month, year after year, and how it makes me wonder, if you came for me now, would I go with you?

John listens, and only later do I realize I inadvertently upset him. He misinterpreted what I said. I wasn’t saying I don’t or didn’t love you. I was reflecting on how far I’ve come from the girl you knew. Perhaps I should try to explain that to John. Perhaps it is cruel not to. In the end, though, I decide to let it lie. He should be able to live with the ambiguity—that raw uncertainty our hearts are made of.

In the summer of 1993, I turn to Maurice. We are in the caves in the south of France. “I am not quite well,” I say—a strange fever, the walls spin, rock pouring into rock, suddenly liquid, and those lines of a cave painting someone made thousands of years ago. I feel a flush of heat, my body suddenly weak. Maurice reaches for me and takes my arm. He has always been that kind of man, prescient, gentle. He guides me, step by rising step, out of the cave into the sunlight of Arles, the rocks and the ground and the wild swirl of cypress trees, the gorgeous blazing world.

A summer flu, a doctor tells us.

That August on the Vineyard, preparing the house for a party, I sit at the dining table, writing out place cards. Something strikes past the window. A shadow, a bird perhaps. Farther down, past the lawn and the scrub, is the sea. The surface shifts, the distant bulk of Nomans Land under a translucent sky.

My head is light.

Marta, folding the napkins, glances up.

“Are you all right?” she says.

“Oh yes,” I say. “I’m fine.”

I feel it, though—that odd and haunting loneliness that sometimes comes in high summer, even in the midst of life, when the house is filled with children, family, friends. Every morning a swim or a bike ride along Moshup Trail, then long afternoons reading books and manuscripts on the bricked corner of the patio behind the library.

I force the loneliness down. I finish the place cards. The menu was set days ago. The shopping is done. Maurice offered to do these things—“It’s a party for you,” he said. Caroline and John offered as well. They had wanted it to be more of a surprise, but I prefer it this way. I know who should be seated near whom to feel at ease. It feels important—still—to build a room, a night suspended from time, with laughter, conversation, shine.

You’d appreciate it, wouldn’t you? Some of my younger friends—the ones you never met. What would you say to them? How would you size them up? What would you ask? I’ve wondered this.

Your face, still, wherever I go.

I am tired. That drained sense I’ve felt since the trip to France. There’s a manuscript I want to finish before the guests arrive. I tell Marta I’ll be on the patio, working. I sit in the chair, a blanket over my knees, a wide-brimmed hat. The breeze is light on my face. A few chapters in, I close my eyes.

When Caroline was getting married, I said to Carolina Herrera, “I’m going to let Caroline decide with you what she wants. I’m not going to interfere, because I had a very bad experience with my wedding dress. It was the dress my mother wanted me to wear, and I hated it. Caroline told me the boys want blazers and white pants. No morning suits. If they’re happy, let’s do it. Just call me from time to time and let me know how it’s going.”

As promised, Carolina Herrera would call after each fitting.

“Is Caroline happy?” I’d ask.

“Yes, she’s very happy.”

“Perfect. That’s the only important thing.”

Caroline’s reception was in Hyannis Port. There was a dance floor, a tent, Japanese lanterns, and a thousand flowers, like the world had come into bloom. That night, Teddy raised a glass and called me “that extraordinary gallant woman—Jack’s only love.”

As Carly Simon sang, the fog rolled in off the sea. The fireworks were suffused in that fog, muted flashes of light and color like summer lightning, tethered to the earth.

I wanted you to see it. So many things I’ve wanted you to see.

Earlier that day, Teddy had walked Caroline down the aisle and given her away. Afterward, on the church steps, I stood with your brother and watched our daughter in a cloud of white organza, as a sea of people flooded in around her. I could not escape the sense that she was being lifted off, wrapped in the hands of an unseen future already woven through the summer air. The bouquet of orchids in her hand, the glint of pearl and diamond earrings, once a gift from you to me. I watched our son blow his sister a kiss as she glanced back to smile at me, before lowering her head into the waiting car. I was still standing with Teddy at the top of those steps. He waved to the crowd, and I let him carry the moment for us, as the car with Caroline in it slowly pulled away. I let my head rest on Teddy’s shoulder, and I looked through my tears to the stone at our feet, just to hold that image of our daughter—the bold, shining strength she had become—heading into her own life. I wanted it fast in my mind.

I told you once, Jack: These are the pieces we’re made of—births, marriages, deaths—these things that happen to anyone, these ordinary moments of a life.

I wake after three, Marta shaking me to say my friend Joe Armstrong has just arrived.

“I brought you a present,” Joe says.

“No gifts!”

“It’s just a cassette. The recording of a Beatles song, ‘When I’m Sixty-Four.’?”

“I don’t know that one.” I take the cassette, walk over to the stereo, and plunk it in.

“It’s from 1967,” Joe says.

“Well, sixty-four was old age then.”

We lean on the edge of the sofa together and listen until the song has played through. Then I take his hand and pretend to be earnest.

“I’ll always feed you, Joe, and I’ll always need you. Even when I’m eighty-four. Now, come and meet my house.”

I introduce him to the kitchen, the sixteen-burner Vulcan stove.

“Perfect for someone who barely cooks,” I say. The fridge is covered with photographs of the children, the grandchildren, and there is one of me with Maurice. We walk through the dining room. In the library, I gesture toward the long shelves of books. “These are my other best friends.”

He inclines his head, a mock bow.

“I’ve been rereading Vasari’s Lives of the Artists,” I say. “There’s a wonderful chapter on how Da Vinci would walk through city streets where caged birds were sold. He’d buy the birds, just to set them free.”

“You and I need a street like that,” Joe says, “and a new project, since we’ve finished saving the ballet.”

“You love ballet now, don’t you?” I say. “Almost as much as I love my new favorite Beatles song.” I smile at him. “I want to show you the orchard. John says the trees get shorter every year.”

The house is set on a rise overlooking Squibnocket Pond and a sweep of woods and fields strung through with old stone walls. As we walk the path to the beach, I tell him I love how tough things have to be in order to grow in this kind of soil—the pitch pine, the bayberry, the scrub oak—their maze of gnarled roots that snake down through the sand as it blows up around them. The salt rose too, which blooms through storms and cold, throwing its scent deep into the fall.

We stop at the rowboat pulled up to the dunes, its hull splintered. I take off my sneakers and leave them on the thwart.

“Have you named it?” Joe asks.

“The boat?”

“Yes.”

“Beauty School Dropout,” I say.

“That’s good!”

I love that Joe’s first job was as a busboy at the Dixie Pig in Abilene, Texas, and that he wears Justin cowboy boots with a three-piece suit. I love, too, the story of how when he was at Rolling Stone magazine and employee morale was down, he’d blast “Drop Kick Me, Jesus (Through the Goalposts of Life)” over the loudspeakers. The first time I heard that story, I called Joe up and invited him to lunch. We talked for four hours that day. We’ve been friends since.

As we walk along the beach, I tuck my arm through his. He asks about the books I’m working on. He asks about Caroline and her children. She has three now: Rose, who just turned five in June; Tatiana, three; and little Jack, six months old.

“And how is John?” Joe asks.

“He’s been very busy getting written up for hundreds of dollars in parking tickets and for eating apple pancakes with Daryl, biking with Daryl, dancing half naked on a roof deck with Daryl.”

Joe laughs. “Do you like her?”

For a moment I’m grateful he’d ask the question any mother should be asked.

“I do,” I say, aware the inflection in my tone makes it less clear. “He’s thinking about leaving the D.A.’s office to start a magazine. Maybe you could talk to him tonight, get a sense of what he’s thinking.”

“Then try to talk him out of it?”

I laugh. We keep walking. He asks about my trip to France. I tell him about the caves in Arles and our visit to La Camargue, the ritual of the horses running into the sea. I mention the summer flu that took weeks to shake. I don’t tell him that just this morning, I woke up, my sheets drenched, my body still so tired. I drank an extra cup of coffee with breakfast, which seemed to do the trick.

He is asking me now why I never wrote a book.

“I don’t even let them put my name in the acknowledgments, Joe.”

“You don’t even think about it?”

“I only want to look ahead.”

That last fall before you died, there was a day with the children at the house in Virginia, the stone path marked in sunlight; John was not quite three, running down the path ahead of us. He leapt to hit each stone and the dogs bounded alongside him, and the grass was trimmed short, a clean, open stretch of green on either side, that flagstone path laid out as bright and clear as anything I could have wanted for their lives. Caroline walked slowly by your side, her hand in yours, her blond head turning every so often to check her own small shadow trailing behind.

Thirty years since then. How could time have moved so fast that it feels at once like yesterday and like an entirely separate life?

“Jackie?”

“Oh, Joe,” I say, putting my mind into place. “I’m so happy you are here.”

After dinner that night, they gather around to sing me “Happy Birthday.”

I forget to make a wish. I eat a skinny piece of cake, then pull on my jacket and slip out for a quick walk and a smoke. The night is velvet on my skin. From the edge of the lawn, I can see them through the window. Caroline, her hair burnished in the lamplight, seems to glow, laughing with her brother and her uncle, with her husband, Edwin, as always, nearby. How different she seems since she married. She’s always been very much her own person. But it’s more noticeable now. At the window, Maurice glances out. He does not see me. I’m too far in the shadows. Then he turns and moves back across the room, that quiet, lumbering grace. They are all there, in that house I laid out in string, inspired by a vision of nights just like this one. Their voices drift through the open window across the lawn, mixing with the play of the waves and the distant toll of a channel bell near the lightships farther out.

I drop my cigarette, the hiss of it extinguished in the wet grass. Night dew has begun to bleed through my shoes.

As a child, I used to wonder who I was before I was a child. I used to imagine an egg living under the snow or a star pinned in the high dark, waiting to fall. I was convinced there was a definitive place I came from—a room of the world, a place of trees and rocks and sky, outside time.

I should go back in. I know this. I should go back and rejoin these people I’ve gathered here—the living that I love—but there’s a certain pleasure in being unseen, simply bearing witness to how they continue, in that house, those rooms, this hour, without me.

I wake early the next morning. I have coffee, rub cold cream over my face, and drive down to the pond to meet Carly Simon for our swim. By the time I come back, the house is awake. Caroline’s little girls have dragged the dollhouse into the hallway and are zooming tiny cars at breakneck speed across the floor. Through the trees and past the garden streams the light, a pendulum at play.

At an afternoon beach picnic, the girls swim with Caroline, while Carly and I sing “Itsy Bitsy Spider” to baby Jack, who’s crawling around a blanket on the sand. I take him for a walk, just the two of us. The wind is soft and warm, and he turns his face into it, his little eyes half-closed. We walk and I tell him how smart he is, how kind he will be, and the extraordinary things he will do in this life. His head tucks into that hollow place at the curve of my neck, where it just fits. “Next summer, you’ll be in my kayak,” I say. “I’ll put you in a life jacket, and we’ll go off on a paddle.”

The house begins to empty—first the guests, who need to get back to their lives, then the children, with kisses and promises to return soon. When they’re gone, I go through the house, looking for toys or books left behind a cushion or under a chair. There’s a sadness that comes when the oak floors are empty, no mess strewn about, everything in its place. Maurice stays for a few days, then returns to the city. The days flow by. There are dinners with the Styrons, Carly, and the Clintons—Hillary, whom I like very much. One Sunday, Lady Bird comes for lunch. It’s a lovely day and we sit under the arbor. Shadows stripe the table and the silver and our hands. We talk about our children and our present lives. We do not talk about the past.

I’ve wondered this: Would you have wanted to know that severe daylight in Dallas would be the last you’d see?

Every Monday I drive to Oak Bluffs to see Dorothy West.

“Do you know I lose my way almost every time I come here?” I say.

We’re drinking tea in Dorothy’s kitchen in the house on Myrtle Avenue. A small plate of egg salad sandwiches, a bowl of carrot sticks, and manuscript pages on the table in short piles arranged by section and chapter.

“I’ll tell you what, Dorothy. You get this book finished for us, and I promise not to get lost anymore between my house and yours.”

“By next summer?”

“Yes. Next summer.”

Dorothy likes to talk, to tell stories. Someone once remarked that Dorothy didn’t know when to set a period, but I love Dorothy’s voice—that hard, open Bostonian A—and her stories. She tells me about living in New York with Zora Neale Hurston and starting a magazine with Richard Wright. She has a column now in the Vineyard Gazette, and on our Monday visits, she always insists on serving tea.

“Does it ever strike you,” I say, “that here we are, the two of us. You never married. I’ve been married twice and am quite finished with it. And here we are working on a book called The Wedding.”

Dorothy laughs.

“Look at these pages.” I pull out a section of the manuscript and point to a passage I’ve marked. “This. What’s happening here—it’s brilliant. The voice in this passage.”

“That’s a voice from forty years ago,” Dorothy says.

“I know. Don’t lose it.”

Driving home, past the moors and the tumble of brush and stone wall, I think about how solitude is the stuff the self is made of. When I am here, on the island alone, I remember who I was before I met you—half a life before. Sometimes what I remember is clearly, definitively true. Other times I feel like it’s only a loosely glued collage of what took place, what I witnessed, did, and felt.

Who would I have been if I’d stayed in France or moved to New York for that job at Vogue? If I’d pursued more, risked more, let myself want more. What would have happened if I had made—all those years ago—a different choice? And why does it seem like such a radical thing? The idea of a woman in love with her own life?

The days stream by, one after the next, into fall. Storms come, fronts building far out on the water. From the house, I watch the iron-dark walls of rain move over the surface, the bright strike of lightning. The gaps in time between those flashes and the thunder shrink as the storm nears. Since I was a child, I’ve loved storms, the reminder that what is wild and unpredictable is always there.

From that time

all his angels

have the one

same

face.

I am reading something intimate and unexpected. A young poet, Anne Carson, I haven’t read before, who blends Sappho and Euripides with modern slang and syntax. I’m curious to know what you’d make of it—these disparate elements merged. But it can happen this way, can’t it? Things meld, and that larger order we call history changes as we age. And yet—does that make what we once believed in less?

I pull my mind back. I’m treading water in the cove with Carly, the salty taste of ocean on my mouth. We’ve taken the Jeep down for a swim. In a few days, I’ll return to New York. As we float in the still-warm water, she tells me about her childhood, how hard it was, like a Tennessee Williams play, she says; she wonders if she could write about it. A buzzing sound overhead. A helicopter circling. At first I think it’s the Coast Guard, then realize it isn’t. Carly hasn’t figured it out yet. She will. She stares at the sky, curious—how lovely she is, long rectangular face, expressive mouth, her hair plastered dark and wet over her broad shoulders. She has that exquisite, almost violent strength glimpsed from time to time in younger women, a strength not yet fully owned.

“The press,” she says.

We start to swim.

When do I know?

It’s almost imperceptible. The slight changes in a body that occur as some new dark thing takes root. A cold that lasts longer than it should. A funny lingering chill that a second sweater can’t stave off. I close the windows earlier in the evenings, even though I hate them closed. That sign of another summer done. I don’t want that funny chill. I tell myself there’s always next year. I pack up the house—manuscripts to bring back to the city, summer clothes I’ll send to be cleaned and stored. The light has changed, and it is beautiful, a sharper angle of it on the marshes as they turn.

Forty years ago in September we walked into St. Mary’s Church, then went back to Hammersmith for the reception. After the cake was cut, I stood and told the eight hundred guests that my mother had always contended you could judge a man by his correspondence. Then I held up the postcard of a passionflower you’d sent to me when you were in Bermuda.

Wish you were here, you’d written. Cheers. Jack.

“And this,” I said, waving the postcard, “is my entire correspondence with Jack.”

I glanced at you then, and you met my eyes and laughed, a faint blush—a little sheepish—rising through your skin that filled me with a sharp, exquisite joy.

It’s a glorious autumn in New York. That dull feeling in my body, though, still. Like the bones are drenched.

“I’m tired,” I tell Maurice. “I’ve just been so tired.”

He is the only one I tell.

Breakfast, coffee, the paper each morning. A children’s dance performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. A dinner for the Municipal Art Society.

I do yoga and take my runs around the reservoir. I watch the grandchildren once a week. I go into the Doubleday office on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. I no longer wear the sunglasses and scarf every time I walk in the streets. What a thrill it was, the first time I did it, to find that only a few heads turned, one or two whispers, then they looked away, and I realized that just as there was a switch I could turn on to draw a room toward me, there was another I could turn off to disappear. I could step out into the street and vanish, just a middle-aged woman in slacks and sneakers, a tote on her shoulder, ballet shoes tucked in with the books and manuscript pages, walking north toward Central Park.

I tell Tillie, my yoga teacher, that when I think about old-ladydom, the one thing I want to always be able to do is ride.

November again.

Thirty years this month. You come near me, as you do, every November. A momentary shudder and I feel you like a shadow cross my hands.

Sometimes it strikes me that I have become an entirely different woman from the woman that you knew.

This year I’ll spend the week before the anniversary in Virginia. I’ll ride in the hunt, then come home to be with the children for the actual day. But leading up to it, I want to be away.

I stay in a small cottage on Bunny Mellon’s farm, near the garden by the main house. Over the years, I’ve come to miss the world I remember from childhood, the wide rolling hills of Virginia, long open fields where I can build a horse’s speed to a gallop, riding faster across the swell of space with the sense that if I ride hard enough, I can catch up to those blue dusky mountains in the distance and lose myself there, in the speed where nothing is fixed and there’s only the smell of the horses, the saddle blankets, and the tack mixed with the fainter scent of hay and the rich cool damp of the green.

Early that morning, when I arrive at the stables at Rokeby, a crust of frost on the grass snaps under my boots. My breath is white in the cold clean air. I look for the horse I usually ride, Frank, the horse I won the trials with three years before.

Afterward, I’ll try to remember what I was thinking when I chose the other horse instead—a dark bay thoroughbred gelding with a neatly braided mane and tail, the one the groom told me used to fly over fences but now might be too settled, too content to follow the hunt.

I lead the horse over to join the others. The hounds pick up the scent of the fox. The horse’s girth and stride feel unfamiliar. Then I adjust, and we’re swept into the speed and rhythm, the cry of the hounds, the peal of the horn echoing back through the valley while a mist fills in among the hills. We come to the wall, gaps where the rise is low. I move away to find a good place to cross, back the horse up, then urge him forward to jump.

I feel it happen, the jerk as his hoof clips an edge of the wall, and my body flows over his head toward the ground.

I open my eyes. You’re somewhere nearby, on the beach. You’re with me and we’re lying in the sun. No one is there. I know this somehow. No one’s looking for us. No one knows we are gone. You’re lying beside me, eyes closed, and the sun has shaped your face. You’re a man in relief—alien, divine—pulled out of sand, dune grass, light. Your eyes open then, your face turning just enough so you’re looking at me, and it is only you again. Young. The way I remember. Your eyes with a kind of forever in them I’d only glimpse from time to time.

“Swim?” you say.

The image snaps. Like the vanishing zip on a television screen before it goes dark.

Bunny’s face. No, not Bunny. Another woman. Bunny’s friend Barbara, leaning over, and a man as well, concerned faces. They tell me I’ve been out for over fifteen minutes. They have phoned Bunny and she is on her way. Their voices waver like static. I remember the last bad fall I took. That one, too, was this time of year. November.

At Loudoun Hospital Center, Bunny’s doctor finds a lump at the top of my thigh.

“You haven’t been feeling well?” he says.

“Always cold. Tired. I was unwell earlier this year, in France. I haven’t seemed to shake it since.”

“Fever?”

“Sometimes at night. Not every night, but some nights.”

He nods. “You’ve been fighting an infection,” he explains. He prescribes a heavy antibiotic. After he leaves the room and I’m slipping off the examining table, finding my clothes, I feel a wave of relief. I’d been afraid it was something worse.

So my spirits are light over the holidays. I spend Thanksgiving with the children, celebrating their birthdays, each in turn as always. Colder weather begins to descend—days of biting wind, a dusting of snow. Holiday lights swathe the avenues, carolers gather in the park, Christmas displays in store windows, the smell of roasted chestnuts, pine. I take my granddaughters to The Nutcracker. I put up a tree in the apartment, draped with old-fashioned ornaments. Their mirrored surfaces catch splintered fragments off the fire.

Marta helps me load the little BMW with presents, my weekend bag, and extra rolls of wrapping paper, ribbon, bows. As I drive out to New Jersey, where I’ll spend Christmas with Caroline’s family, John, and Maurice, I listen to the cassette of Carly’s duet with Sinatra. Then I pop that tape out and pop in another. It’s Carly’s voice I want to fill the car—that big, bold poet voice, carving hunger out of nothing. I hum along, tapping the steering wheel, even as I hit the tunnel and the line of cars ahead slows. A few years ago, I was passing through this same tunnel in my car. I’d let my friend William drive. We got caught behind a tractor trailer. William was so tentative, stuck behind that truck. He’d edge out, then edge back in, refusing to cross the solid double line to pass, although there was no oncoming traffic. “You’re not going to let us spend the next half hour like this, are you?” I asked as he edged out again. “Oh, for God’s sake, William. Just gun it.”

In the Caribbean after Christmas, I’m with Maurice when I’m struck by an agonizing pain in my back and groin, a swelling in my neck that doesn’t abate.

We come home to New York early.

The diseased cells are anaplastic—what the doctors call “primitive,” which sounds like it might be early and a good thing but which I learn is neither. In a way, I’m glad I didn’t know this until now. I didn’t have that word—cancer—with me over Christmas. I didn’t have that word traveling with Carly’s voice and all those gifts piled into the car as I drove through the Lincoln Tunnel toward my children.

It strikes me as extraordinary—the way I am floating up there in a corner of the ceiling in the doctor’s office, the way one word can change the shape of everything.

“So all those push-ups I did were sort of a waste of time,” I say.

They map a course of treatment.

“We think it’s curable,” the doctor says.

Define think,I almost say.

“I still want to work,” I tell Maurice quietly as we wait to take the elevator down.

He is next to me in the living room when I tell John and Caroline. I brace myself for the sudden devastation in their faces but can’t bear it when it comes. They cry and hug me, their arms as tight around my body as they were when they were small—these two extraordinary beings, each the split half of my heart, and for a moment I feel the careful walls I’ve made weaken as my children’s grief and fear wash into mine.

“I’ve decided it’s just something else to get through,” I tell Arthur Schlesinger on the phone. “I’ll wear a turban and start a new trend. The nurses are good to us. When I have scans, Maurice and I sneak in before seven in the morning. I wear a hooded cape and wait outside in the car. He checks to make sure the waiting room is clear before he walks me in.”

I listen to my voice recounting this, like it’s happening to someone else. I think suddenly of Clint Hill. Where is he now?

“What do the doctors say?” Arthur asks.

“I’ve been through hard things before, as you know. Now I just need to get through this.”

Hanging up the phone, I go into Caroline’s old room, the one I use for yoga. The walls are as Caroline left them, one filled with black-and-white photographs of Jack. Everything is as she left it, the school notebooks and horse-show ribbons, every knickknack on the bureau and the shelves, as if my daughter, fifteen again, might walk in, throw herself down on the bed with a question and her father’s eyes and that mane of dark-blond hair.

“Why should I be a public figure?” I overheard her complain to a friend once. It was not the question I found thrilling but the defiance in my daughter’s voice—an anger I recognized that she would sharpen to carve her own life. I roll my yoga mat out, leave the overhead off. I lie down and pull my knees into my chest, the curve of my spine pressing into the floor, feeling vertebra by vertebra, those slight interlocking knobs of bone with just enough space between them.

I never quite did what they wanted, did I? I wasn’t who they thought or who they needed me to be. I chose to fail them. Even during those four days, I was not brave….

I listen to the tiny pop of vertebrae as they release. My legs rise, lifting over my head, the long exhale as the bones of my cervical spine shift.

I was not strong. I did not hold the country together. In a way, I was barely there. To me, it was not about dignity or majesty or theater. It was never the way they told it. I only did what I thought was right, and I did the best I could. I did what anyone would have done to honor the integrity of someone they loved.

I never loved anyone the way that I loved you.

Doris Kearns Goodwin once mentioned to me how remarkable it was that I’d been able to raise my children in such a way that each developed as a free, independent spirit even as the three of us shared such a deep bond.

I smiled and said, “It’s the best thing I’ve ever done.”

I could have added, I’ve often felt it was the only thing.

I talk with my friend Nancy Tuckerman about how to present my illness to the press.

“You don’t think we should say anything about the stage, do you?” Tucky asks.

“You could say early stage.”

“Is it?”

I smile. “Well, I only recently learned about it, so in that sense at least.”

Tucky studies the draft. “We could say apparently early.”

“Yes, that’s good. I like that. Apparently.”

The world has divided my life into three:

Life with Jack.

Life with Onassis.

Life as a woman who works because she wants to.

My life is all of these things, and it is none of these things. They continue to miss what’s right in front of them. What has always been there. I love to work. I love books. I love the sea. I love horses. Children. Art. Ideas. History. Beauty. Because beauty blows us open to wonder, and wonder is what allows us to shift and love and ache and grow and change. Even the beauty that breaks your heart.

I am in the shower when the first strands of hair fall out. A slight dark nest in my fingers. I put my hand to my scalp and pull.

I go to work with Band-Aids on my hands and arms. Once there is a bruise from the infusions that I watch bloom and fade—a lopsided exploding star.

John has moved from his downtown apartment into a hotel down the street from me. He visits every day. I ask if he remembers me teaching him to ski when he was a child. He fell and started to cry. Bobby skied up and said sternly, “Now, you stop that. Kennedys don’t cry.”

“This Kennedy cries,” John had lashed back at him.

“Do you remember that?” I ask John, even knowing that he must, whether or not he does, because it’s a story I’ve told so many times.

“How happy you made me that day,” I say.

The proofs of Peter Sis’s new book are in. The Three Golden Keys. It has the kind of magic I love, the story of a balloonist who lands in the ancient city of his childhood and goes home. The streets of the city are empty and dark, and he comes to a locked door where a cat is waiting for him.

The art is extraordinary.

“Just let it be dark, Peter,” I’d said to him before he started. “Because every good fairy tale—no matter how lovely—has a dark, violent shard at its heart. That’s where we learn who we are. Be as free as you want with this book. If it’s going to be dark or scary or strange, you do it.”

And he has. It’s a haunting story, lit with an unruly, luminous flare.

I start to write him and find I don’t quite know how to say what I want to say. I’ll call instead, I decide. But then he’ll ask how I’m doing. They all ask now: How are you? How is it going? These are questions I learned to answer without really answering years ago. It’s harder now.

I’ll tell Peter we must start thinking about his next book.

I start to dial, then hang up. I’ll try another day.

It snows, a blizzard, ten-foot drifts. The office is closed. The snow tapers off. The wind shifts and blows off the clouds; the sky rushes in. Caroline comes over, and we take the girls outside to play, their little selves stuffed into snowsuits. We cross the street to the paths through the park. We tramp through the drifts and pack snowballs. “GrandJackie, catch!” Rose shrieks.

We spill back into the apartment, their little cheeks red, lips blue, wet clothes in puddles on the floor. “Just leave it,” I say. That careless mess feels like a handwriting that is theirs, and I want it to last.

Caroline makes the girls cinnamon toast and big mugs of hot chocolate. They stir in the marshmallows, sticky streaks down their faces. A brief squabble over a cookie. “There are more,” I say, but their fingers are grasping after the last one on the plate, which has a crooked extra band of icing, and the light is in their eyes, that sudden fight mixed with laughter and the smell of chocolate and falling bits of snow blown into the sunlight pouring down through the long windows. Sunlight strikes their cheeks, their mouths, their chocolate-smeared chins. Sunlight bright on their dark hair.

A funny twitch like a blade against my throat. This is the life I will miss.

That night in bed, I close my eyes and feel my granddaughters’ hands again as they were leaving, kissing me goodbye, their sweet small fingers through my hair.

I begin to work from home. Maurice sets up an office for himself in my apartment, so he’s nearby if I need him. I still try to go into the office for Wednesday editorial meetings. I wear a beret to cover the wig, and I bring edited manuscript pages to be sent off to writers, my typed memos attached, pencil scrawl along the margins.

There is less of me now.

Each day.

Less.

I write letters to friends: I shall look forward to our doing something together when all this first part is over…. I write to Louis Auchincloss: Your beautiful letter. I was touched by your writing it. All will be well, I promise…. I write to John Loring: Everything is fine. Soon we can have another festive lunch at Le Cirque. Six desserts each. Seeing you is always like champagne…. I write to one of my authors, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: Isn’t it wonderful the way our friendship is growing?

Finally, because I haven’t been able to pick up the phone and call him, I write Peter Sis: Your book is magnificent. Each drawing looks into the well of an artist’s mind…. It is like nothing I have ever seen before.

I write these letters on the same blue stationery I’ve had for years, 1040 Fifth Avenue embossed in white. Blue for the sea and the sky, white for the shell and the bone and the breath that continues to rise. That which is left over.

I fold the letters, envelopes sealed and addressed. I set them with the mail to go out.

Outside, spring has begun. The trees melting into themselves, buds like tiny fists coming slightly apart, grass smudged in the warmer air, color blending into color, even the streets and the edges of buildings starting to blur.

The scans say they have gotten all of it from my neck and chest and abdomen—all but a tiny crumb that has run off and escaped to my brain. They can drill a hole in my skull, they tell me.

“If it can work, that would be fine,” I say.

I begin to divide my things. Boxes of papers and notes, bunches of letters bound in ribbon. Things I haven’t looked at in years. Some I’ll keep. Others not. There are many letters in the pile of Not.

Once in a while, reading through them, I’ll stop and remember who I was on a particular day. It will hit in a rush, right down to the sounds and the smells, those older layers of my life still there.

Maurice comes into the room. He glances at the fire, then at the heap of papers to be burned by the chair where I sit, the astrakhan blanket over my lap. He stops, a question in his face, as if to ask, Are you sure? I smile at him. He touches my shoulder and heads in the direction of the kitchen.

Novalis once wrote that fiction arises out of the shortcomings of history. But I’ve come to realize no matter what truths I leave for the world to rifle through, they’ll concoct the stories of my life they want to tell—to worship me or tear me down, their ice queen or their whore.

The world does not need more of me than it thinks it has.

I’m nearing the end of a stack of papers when a loose sheet falls out. I look more closely—my handwriting from when I was younger. These are the bones of desire. A few lines crossed out. The paper is torn. Only a fragment. I wonder why I would’ve kept it. For a moment I can’t place the context, then I do. A day years ago; we were not yet married. In Georgetown, at the corner of N Street, as Jack said goodbye, he touched my waist, leaned in, and kissed me briefly on the cheek. Something so pedestrian—a boy, a girl, a street corner. I’d filled pages, I remember now. Far more than just these lines. I start to shuffle through that pile, then untie the next and go through that too, but I find nothing else. I leave the papers strewn around. No neat ribboned bundles now, no order. I stand up, thirsty, but my head is light; I sit back down.

One night years ago, at a dinner party, you were talking to Ben Bradlee about biography.

“What makes that kind of writing so fascinating,” you remarked, “is the struggle to answer the single question: What was he really like?”?

In history, you told me once, we turn toward what was lost because we crave the dream of a world that might have been.

I write out a will.

For Bunny Mellon, the eighteenth-century Indian miniature Lovers Watching Rain Clouds.

For Maurice, the Greek alabaster head of a woman.

For Alexander Folger, a copy of Jack’s inaugural address, signed by Robert Frost.

The White House things still in my possession will go to the Kennedy Library; the furniture, knickknacks, and other tangibles to Sotheby’s to be sold. My books I’ll leave to the children. My books and my houses and some money. And the vastest sky. And all the time in the world, which, when sooner turns to later, is the only currency we have.

In April, Carly invites me to lunch at her apartment on Central Park West. Joe Armstrong is there, as are my friends Peter Duchin; his wife, Brooke Hayward; and Ken Burns. I ask Ken about the documentary he’s finishing on the history of baseball.

“Is it true that Carly’s going to sing ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’?”

“Could we have it any other way?”

I laugh. “We could not.”

Joe asks how I’m feeling.

“It’s a nuisance,” I say. “Four more weeks, this treatment will be done, and I’ll get my life back. I’m going to spend the summer on the Vineyard.” They go on talking. I half listen, settling back into the sofa. I’m tired. But Caroline is bringing the children to visit tomorrow. I look forward to that. There are so many things, it seems, to look forward to. Carly is laughing now at something Joe said. Her extravagant strong-hearted laughter lights a room. I love how Carly laughs—without caution or distance or fear. We’ve talked together about how you can’t live your life on eggshells and live it well.

A few years ago, Carly and I were sitting in this same room. We’d decided to go to the movies. She was flipping through the listings, theaters, and showtimes. We were looking for something in the late afternoon, planning for dinner after.

“What about that new film JFK?” Carly said.

“I don’t actually think I could see that,” I said. Her head snapped up, eyes wide, horrified. Her hand flew to her mouth.

“Oh, Jackie, I’m so sorry. I just forgot. I can’t believe I forgot.”

“And you have no idea how much I love that you forgot.”

“I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas: they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind.”

Catherine Earnshaw said this in Bront?’sWuthering Heights.

It’s a passage I’ve always loved. It’s different to me now because of you.

How simple it’s become.

That transcendent mythology that was ours.

Who we were, what we wanted, what we dreamed and made, believed, and failed to be.

Once, desire clung to us like heat

We were bodies of light falling through time

I wake to the world in white and beige, unfamiliar faces. The room comes into focus. A window, a shelf, a chair; Caroline is there, stepping out of the white-beigeness to tell me I collapsed at home. I was brought here. John is coming. He is on his way.

Maurice, I notice then, is here too, behind Caroline, who has sat down on the edge of my bed and is holding my hand.

“Could you call the office, please, Caroline,” I say. “Call Scott and ask him to let Peter Sis know I won’t be able to make our appointment today but that we will reschedule soon.”

Sometimes, looking at our daughter’s face, I see through the woman she’s become to the girl with the wind in her eyes. I see through that inimitable strength and penetrating intellect shaped out of a deep and lasting sorrow, honed by what she remembers and what she has endured.

She has your easy grace—that casual ferocity and burning faith. But in her, it’s tempered with restraint, more aware and more humane. From the time she was young, she seemed to understand that the present moment is a thing to take our time with.

“When may I go home?” I ask, first a nurse, then the doctor.

“When we’ve figured out your fever.”

“I’m sure I can have a fever at home.”

It’s deep in the lungs now, the doctor explains. I sit for a moment in silence when he tells me this.

“No more treatments, please. I want to go home.”

I see the children every day for the rest of that spring, as I have since January. Every night after supper, I phone Caroline’s house, good-night hugs and kisses to Tatiana and Rose.

No one tells you it happens like this: a funny ripple at the edges of things—a gnawing away—like a new country sliding over the familiar. Stitches coming undone.

How would I describe it?

It’s not what you’d expect—

The severing is a thing you can feel.

The day is made of walls, and walls are air.

You are of the air. And not.

You are the slant of evening light against a tree.

A cool breeze moving now through a cracked window, turning the page.

It’s not what you’d expect.

Not as you came to understand it growing older, but how you might have dreamed it as a child.

You are a thousand selves, and that other sky is here.

One Sunday in May, I wake up to bright light flooding in.

“Let’s take a walk in the park today, Maurice,” I say.

That afternoon, we cross Fifth Avenue with Caroline and the children.

“Isn’t it something?” I remark as we pause to let a raft of bicyclists pass. “One of the most glorious springs I can remember, and after such a terrible winter.” I lean on Maurice; the girls are ahead, Caroline pushing the stroller with baby Jack. Runners and more cyclists flow by, shreds of conversation, light on bare shins, forearms pale, a woman in yellow shorts on Rollerblades, a Frisbee tucked under her arm. The grass is just so bright.

I feel my breath catch—so much effort, these small steps, this distance. Maurice glances at me.

“I’m fine,” I say with a smile, and he touches my hand. We continue walking. The path splits, then merges again. A bench up ahead in the sun.

“Do you want to sit, Mom?” Caroline asks.

“Not yet. We’ll find another spot, farther on, where the girls can play.”

“We can stop here for a while, then find another spot too.”

But Tatiana and Rose have skipped ahead. They’ve made up a game—part hopscotch, part tag—their dark hair bright, little jackets swinging open and flapping behind them like cropped wings. When they’ve drifted too far ahead, their mother calls them. They pause at the sound of her voice. Dark heads bent together, they confer with each other and wait as Caroline starts toward them.

And the park is a green lake all around. The girls seem to shimmer there, at the edge of it, at the top of the rise; they are tall and straight and strong, their bodies small pillars of fire. Their mother has almost reached them. She nods. They turn then and they run.

It is really only this:

The world is alive to me because of you.