Page 55 of Jackie

On the second day of the New Year, a Saturday morning, Jack stands in the Senate Caucus Room and announces his candidacy for president. I buy him a puppy.

“To celebrate,” I say.

He laughs.

“You just wanted a dog,” he says.

“No, this dog is for you. Welsh terriers are very kind to people with allergies.”

“We’ll call him Charlie,” says Jack, as he picks up the dog and holds him still so Caroline can stroke the silky ears.

I campaign with Jack that winter, crisscrossing the country, climbing out of cars into the wind and slush. I work down one side of the street while he works down the other; hundreds of hands in the morning, hundreds more in the afternoon. Towns start to blend. I read De Gaulle’s memoirs and Henry Adams’s Democracy, marking passages to share with Jack. In the papers, I follow the story of four Black boys who walk into the Woolworths in Greensboro, North Carolina, sit down at the lunch counter, and refuse to get up until they are served.

I ask him about it.

“We can’t afford to lose the Southern white vote,” he says.

“Then you might have to figure out how to have that and the Black vote too.”

—

Teddy and his young wife, Joan, rent a house two blocks away from ours. They just had their first baby. I do Joan’s grocery shopping and help her find a nanny. For over a year, I’ve watched Teddy and Joan wash around in an unfinished life, no home of their own, schlepping suitcases back and forth from Hyannis Port to Palm Beach and back.

“It’s like riding a metronome, isn’t it?” I say to Joan one day. We’re sitting in her new living room. The baby has just woken up from a nap. “She’s beautiful, Joan.”

“She looks like Teddy, doesn’t she?”

“She’ll be a Hollywood beauty like you. We still need to get you curtains for this room.”

“It’s lovely,” Joan says, “just as it is. You’ve done so much for me.”

“Almost, but we’ll get there.”

She breaks down and talks about the trouble in her marriage.

“It’s not that I don’t love Teddy,” she says. “It’s just felt arranged from the start. Jean introduced us, you know, like Bobby and Ethel, but—”

“The rest of us will never be Ethel enough.”

She smiles. Only six or seven years younger than I am but she seems so very new to all this. She straightens the baby’s cloth on her shoulder, a stain of spit-up near her hair, in her hair.

“Ted had doubts too,” she says. “And I still feel unsure.”

“I don’t know if one is ever sure,” I say. “But this summer, let’s be different together. The rest of them can sail, football, and Kennedy around, and you can play the piano while I paint. We’ll go for walks on the beach. If we don’t come back, they can launch a search.”

She smiles, a fragile smile. “I know Ted runs around with other girls.”

“All Kennedy men are like that,” I say. “It means nothing.”

She looks uncertain; I feel something swift and dark move through me. I push it off.

“You can’t let it mean a thing, Joan,” I say.

…

Jack is home for three days in the middle of March before the Wisconsin primary. It’s the first warm spring day. We walk down to the canal. On our way home, as we’re approaching a crosswalk, a car slows. Jack is ahead, carrying Caroline. He’s telling her a story he made up about the sea; her hair spills toward his shoulder, that half-fantasy space the two of them disappear into. The car pulls alongside.

“Jack Kennedy.” It’s Marion Leiter—Oatsie. “Where are you headed?”

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