Page 41 of Jackie

The social roundabout continues. Dinner with the Wrightsmans in honor of the empress of Iran. A formal dance in Monte Carlo. A friend of Lee’s has lent us his house overlooking the sea. Sitting with Jack at breakfast one morning, I realize we haven’t argued once since he arrived. Everything feels easier between us, less coldness, that sweet banter flickering back, and for a moment I want to stay in this world, however rarefied and unreal, that is not ours.

He’s across the small wrought-iron table from me, reading the newspaper. A headline on the front page: Chicago Boy Lynched.

“What’s that article, Jack?”

He murmurs something about being done in a moment. I look down at the garden, the ruffled heads of trees. A motorboat moves toward the dock below.

“He’s here, Jackie,” Lee calls from inside the house.

Jack looks up from the paper.

“Who?”

“Gianni Agnelli,” I say. “Lee arranged for him to take us waterskiing.”

I don’t say: Would you like to come? With his back, he can’t risk the hard bounce over the wake. I pick up my towel and start down the hill to the dock. I can feel his eyes on me.

That night he stays close to me, his hand a slight pressure at the small of my back as we walk into the room to meet the others for drinks before dinner. On our way upstairs at the end of the night, he slides his hand along the back of my thigh. I almost tease him. Did you like watching me step onto that motorboat with Agnelli-of-Fiat-fortune and zoom off? What about it did you like?

In the bedroom, he pulls up my dress and makes love to me against the wall, then pulls me down on the bed. I wrap my legs around his hips and draw him into me, his mouth electric on my body in the dark.

Fall 1955

I’m in the living room in Hyannis Port with Bobby and Jack as they talk about trouble in the South. A Chicago boy, visiting relatives near the Mississippi Delta, was murdered for whistling at a white woman. Two men came by his great-uncle’s house, dragged the boy out, beat him, torched him, drowned him in the river. When he was found, a cotton-gin fan laced with barbed wire had been wrapped four times around his neck to weigh him down.

“Fourteen years old,” Bobby says.

“It’s another country down there,” says Jack.

“If it was, it wouldn’t be your problem.”

“What those men did, it’s unthinkable,” I say.

They both look at me, and for a moment it’s startling—how different they are, their faces, expressions. Jack is cool, surveying, calibrating. Bobby’s eyes, though, are just so bright, an icy fire and an uncommon depth in them I’m not expecting to see.

“Story’s everywhere now because of the photographs,” Bobby says. “A close-up of the boy’s face. Mangled. Another of his mother at the funeral home. She chose open casket.”

“And the men were acquitted,” says Jack.

“Sure. In a Southern trial.”

—

I’ll remember this conversation months later, when I read an interview with Rosa Parks where she talks about how the real reason she didn’t get up from her bus seat that day was because she couldn’t stop thinking about that murdered boy and his mother who insisted on an open casket so the world could see what had been done—that boy named Emmet Till.

“How do you think it will end?” I ask Bobby when Rosa Parks is arrested for a second time, in early 1956.

“This is only the start,” Bobby says.

“Do you think Jack sees it that way?”

“He’s going to have to.”

I don’t say anything then. I’m curious what, if anything, he’ll add.

But he changes the subject. “How’s the ankle?”

I smile. “I’m afraid that sprain was the end of my touch-football career.” I don’t tell him I’m pregnant. Jack and I agreed not to tell anyone until I see the doctor again, but the secret has forged something new between us, that giddy and tenuous promise—a baby due later this year.

---