Page 79 of Jackie

Overnight, we travel to Mykonos. I wake the next morning into a blaze of light. The buildings on the island tumble over each other like dice. We walk up the steep hill through the winding streets of town toward the villa of Helen Vlachos, the only woman in Greece who owns a newspaper.

“The light is different here,” I say to her. “It seems to reveal more.” We’re eating lunch under an arbor of flowering fruit trees. “I want to bring my children to visit.”

“Before you leave Athens,” she says, “be sure to make the climb to Cape Sounion and the Temple of Poseidon. Lord Byron carved his name into one of the pillars.”

A butterfly lands on the table near a vase of flowers, its wings bluish, sheer, and I think of that day I first came to Hyannis Port, years ago, Jack and I in his childhood bedroom with all those books, the stories of heroes and legends he’d loved as a child. I remember his face as he lay back on the bed and looked at me, that look I’ve never seen in anyone but him.

“Go late in the day to Cape Sounion,” Helen Vlachos says to me now. “It has an unearthly beauty at sunset. One of the most magnificent sites in Greece.”

Days later, I take that walk along the cape near the Temple of Poseidon. As the sun collapses into the sea, I step carefully around an archaeological dig, long pits in the ground exposing layers of rock and stratified earth, pottery, bones—levels of what was once a sunlit world layered over other worlds, the dead layered over the dead like leaves.

We never imagine it. That we will be there someday, centuries from now, skulls ground to unnamed and intimate fragments, trampled by new generations who in turn can’t imagine their lives will also be broken to dust. Jack would understand this, the nuanced implications; even if he didn’t want to, he would—how everything marked critical, classified, urgent, eventually turns to this.

—

He meets me at the airport. Slipping into the car, I kiss him. He thumps on the back of the driver’s seat. “Let’s go.”

His back hurts. I can tell by the set in his jaw. There was a story in the paper while I was away and photographs of him boarding a cherry picker that would lift him from the tarmac to the plane because he couldn’t climb the steps. I know how much he hates it—the weakness.

I hold his hand and watch the moving sky through the window. I feel a strange and heady disconnect, like only half of me is home, while the other half still drifts through the whitewash of those islands, the rising daylight six hours ahead, the gorgeous blue waste of the sea.

That sense stays with me for weeks—even as I rework curriculum plans for Caroline’s preschool; even as I skim the landslide of clippings that praise my state visits, saying the intractable Khrushchev was smitten; even when two Russians walk into the White House, bearing a gift from him to me, one of the space-dog puppies, which I name Pushinka; even when Jack starts calling me the “sex symbol,” because he’s read the same news stories and seen photographs of this glamorous woman who took Europe by storm and happens to be the woman he’s married to.

“She’s a figment,” I tell him.

He smiles. “As long as she’s what they want.”

…

I’m with the children for the rest of that summer in Hyannis Port. Long hours with Joe on the porch of the main house. Every morning, I take Caroline to the stables to ride. In the afternoons, I work through memos and folders of correspondence sent up from Washington.

I’ve begun to rethink the vision for the state rooms at the White House—the Red Room and the Blue Room. I want to shape something in those rooms: a purely American sense of strength, discipline, purpose. National power, or at least the impression of it, even as Jack grows into the thing itself. I want those rooms to become a space where he, as a leader, can emerge into history.

I keep thinking of Greece—that water and sky, how the ancient, brilliant light revealed more, stripped more away, that light a kind of alchemy. I want to do that here. Work elements of a physical space into beauty and significance, infuse a room with a sense of promise and truth. I don’t want artifice. Artifice will bleach to nothing in the light of time. That’s not what I’m after.

The days pull toward Friday afternoon and the three-o’clock chime of the ice cream truck, shortly followed by a phone call to say that Air Force One has arrived at Otis and Jack is on his way. Within the hour, he’ll blow in. Caroline will race him up the steps so he can change into sneakers and drive her in the golf cart to the candy store in town before it closes.

“Let me say hello to your mother, Buttons.”

“But she’ll be here all night, and the candy store won’t.”

He’ll pop his head into whatever room I’m in. “Hey, kid,” he’ll say—that smile. “It’s you.”

His back pain has improved, and that lightens his mood. Even when he limps, there’s a grace in his step. On those long summer weekends, there are blueberries and corn, clam chowder, and lobster rolls. There are swims or a cruise on the Marlin. When storms roll in, there’s backgammon, Chinese checkers, and late-afternoon daiquiris. In the main house, away from the children and their rough-and-tumble, there are debates and strategy meetings for Jack, Bobby, and their team about how to avoid a nuclear showdown with the Soviets. A crisis has developed in Berlin. On August 12, a barbed-wire fence went up overnight, dividing the eastern and western parts of that city. Nearly two hundred kilometers, the Berlin Wall runs through cemeteries and zigzags along canals, closing the border between communist East Germany and the West. Jack has refused to do what Khrushchev demanded—remove U.S. troops from West Berlin. “We’ll defend free Germany,” Jack says.

Toward the end of August, Khrushchev sends a private letter to Jack about how a tentative peace, or at least a hold in the conflict, might be approached. The letter is unofficial, but it creates a sense of pause.

That evening Jack and I sit together on the porch. It feels unusual to have that bit of time alone. The sun is down. Tribes of moths beat around the screen. I tell him then about the walk I took along the dig at Cape Sounion, how the sky seemed to stretch and breathe, the raw, haunted sense I felt in that place.

“It reminded me of Homer’s epics,” I say. “Those ruins infused with the dead—bodies loved or slain, pressed together in passion or war. Even the heroes.”

Jack smiles. “Even the heroes.”

“I wish you’d been there with me. I want to go sometime to that place with you.”

“I’ll carve my name on the pillar next to Byron’s.”

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