Page 167 of Jackie

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.

Part V

The heart of a woman who waits, her mind like a man’s

—Aeschylus, translated by Chappell

After war, after any act of inconceivable violence, the world is neatly divided between those who are dead and those who remain. Troy was no different. When that ten-year siege was done—the walls of the glittering city razed, pillaged, burned—when the Greeks set off from the shores, when the old Trojan king was murdered along with his sons and the baby Astyanax hurled from a parapet, his tiny skull smashed—past and future leveled in an instant—afterward, who remains?

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