Page 106 of Jackie

Three in the morning on Friday the first of November, the phone rings.

“It’s begun,” he says when he hangs up. “Four minutes. That’s all the notice they gave.”

He gets out of bed, snaps the back brace into place. Before he leaves the room, he comes over and kisses me. “I love you,” he says.

Diem is dead, he learns the following day.

Jack is shaken. He had been promised Diem would be extracted peacefully, taken into exile. The military who led the coup try to claim it was a suicide, but photographs surface, showing Diem and his brother lying in blood in the back of a truck. Executed. Stabbed and shot, hands tied behind their backs.

“It shouldn’t have happened like this,” Jack says. “I should have known.”

“You couldn’t have known.”

He glances at me, his eyes so much older now.

“That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have.”

…

Franklin and Sue Roosevelt are the ones who tell me about Adlai Stevenson in Texas. They’ve come for dinner at the Residence, along with the French ambassador Hervé Alphand and his wife, Nicole. Jack is late. We’ve had two rounds of cocktails when I decide we’ll start dinner without him. As soon as we sit down, Franklin tells me it’s not a good idea—our planned trip to Dallas.

“Because of Adlai,” he says.

“They threw a placard at his head,” says Sue, “and left an awful bruise.”

“That’s not what happened,” Franklin says. “The placard missed him, but they pelted him with eggs. Called him a communist, a traitor.”

I listen, absorbing this.

“We’re not saying you shouldn’t go, Jackie,” Franklin says.

“That’s exactly what you’re saying,” says Alphand.

“Jack has to go,” I say.

“But you don’t. You could say your doctors have advised against it.”

“Hard to say that after three weeks in Greece,” I say, my eyes on the curve of the spoon skimming through the soup.

“You needed that trip.”

“I’m not sure Texas will be so understanding.”

“Well, go, then. But skip Dallas.”

Jack is coming. His steps in the hallway.

“They started without me, Mr. West?” I hear him say, teasing the chief usher as they enter the room. I don’t look up as Jack sits down. I want to put my face back together, push the fear out—he’ll know something is awry. He would be angry with them for telling me about Adlai.

—

Bill Walton phones. He tells me he went to see Elaine de Kooning in New York. Her studio was filled with images of Jack, over forty oil portraits, raw sketches and charcoal studies of his face pinned to the walls and scattered on the floor—Jack standing, seated, energy in the rough brushstrokes, like he’s about to bolt right out of his chair. She had a ladder set up to work on a massive canvas that reached to the ceiling. There was one painting, Bill says, he found particularly stunning. In an abstract sea of color and shadow, only Jack’s eyes. De Kooning told Bill that all year she’d painted Jack. Only Jack. She’d finish a portrait, then she’d have to start over. Each time she felt like she’d missed the essence and all she was able to catch was a glimpse.

—

Caroline gets out of school early. Our things packed, the children and I fly to Wexford. While John marches off in boots and helmet with his toy gun toward an army tent the agents have made for him, I take Caroline to the stables. The afternoon is starched and cool. As we ride, I feel that chill air cut against my neck. Caroline turns her pony off to work in the ring, but I urge Sardar across the open field. The horse’s pace quickens, my legs tight against the flank, a sensation I love—that sense of speed and control as the yellow-green trees flood by.

Clint is waiting at the stables. Caroline was hungry, he says; she’s gone up to the house.

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