Page 141 of Jackie

I glance at Bobby. Another match, another cigarette; it all continues on until we get to the part about happiness.

—

“I was happy,” I say, “for Jack, that he could be proud of me. Because you know it made him so happy, and that made me happy. So those were our happiest years.”

—

The words catch in my throat. I glance at the tape. Arthur looks at me. I nod. He shuts it off.

There was nothing rarefied about it. It was simple. A boy and a girl. A man and a woman. A marriage. With all the tiny thorns and joys that reside in that word.

—

“Sometimes I feel it’s wrong,” I say. I don’t look at Bobby, because I know he won’t want me to say this. “We talk like there is only one history.”

“People believed in Jack,” Arthur says. “I think if there’s something the world will need a year from now, or fifty years from now, it will be to know there was once a man worth believing in.”

The tape is still off. My throat so dry, like all that’s real are those things left unsaid.

A few weeks ago I was out with the children, dirty snow plowed up on either side of the street. We ducked into a drugstore. I’d promised them hot chocolate. As I walked up to the counter to order, John saw the magazine cover with the blurred photograph of us in the car.

—

Mummy, close your eyes.

…

“You have to get stronger,” Bobby says to me after Arthur leaves. “Get past this. Move on.”

“That’s Ethel talking.”

“There’s a priest we’d like you to meet.”

“Ethel thinks I need some God.”

“He’s a great tennis player.”

“Ethel thinks I need a better forehand.”

“Please, Jackie, just try.”

I look at him, the dizzying rush of alone.

—

He thinks he understands. Your brother. He thinks we are in this together, but he was eating lunch when he heard. A tuna fish sandwich. Ethel answered the ringing phone and told him to pick up the patio extension. It was Hoover. Calling to say you’d been shot. That’s how Bobby learned. Through the words of a man he did not trust.

He knows nothing of bone and blood.

I am suddenly angry. Ethel is moving on, the rest of the country is moving on, and your brother is telling me to move on, even as he is still falling apart. He’s lost weight. He barely sleeps. He’s been wearing your clothes—your old blue topcoat, your leather bomber jacket that hangs all wrong on him, your kid brother, his frame too small. I should be more forgiving. He is sleepless, as I am sleepless. Tormented by the possibility that actions he took in Cuba and how he cracked down on the mob, those choices he made as attorney general, could have led to your death and maybe did. In that sense, perhaps, he is no further away from the awful dark of it than I am.

—

“I’m sorry, Jackie,” Bobby says.

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.

—

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