Page 98 of Jackie

“It would be good for me to see her and have some time away.”

“Your sister is sleeping with the biggest crook in Europe,” he says. “Onassis.”

We’re outside in the shade of the flagstone patio. The light has come to the edge where I sit. It skirts my bare feet. My shoes are set next to John’s little red sneakers.

“You have so much to do,” I say. “You’ll barely miss me.”

“That’s not true.”

…

Almost evening, on Thursday, September 12, Jack arrives in Newport for our anniversary. The helicopter lands at dusk on the lawn at Hammersmith Farm. I step toward him, and his arms slip around me. He holds me for a long moment.

—

There are twelve of us for dinner that night, including Ben and Tony Bradlee, Claiborne and Nuala Pell, my mother, Hughdie, my stepbrother Yusha. Everyone gathers in the hall downstairs.

“Where’s Jackie?” I hear Jack say through the door to the terrace. “Yusha, where’d she go?”

“I think just outside.”

Jack comes through the door as I turn. “There you are,” he says; he takes my hand and we walk back in. The others have begun to flow into the Deck Room and to the table set near the tall windows that catch the shine of plates and bowls, the unstable reflections of wineglasses. Those windows give way to the dark plunge of lawn into the sea and the deep lasting blue of the twilight over Narragansett Bay.

We exchange gifts. I give Jack a set of brass blazer buttons with the Irish Brigade insignia, a scrapbook of the Rose Garden, and a St. Christopher medal to replace the one he tucked in with Patrick. He gives me a slim gold ring with ten emerald chips, each stone marking a year of our marriage. “An eternity ring,” he says, almost in passing.

“And one other thing,” he says. On the carved circular table, he’s set out an assortment of unwrapped gifts from the Klejman Gallery in New York.

“All of these, Jack?”

“No, you have to choose.”

I smile. “But it’s a gift. Shouldn’t you be the one to choose?”

“You have to pick the one you want.”

Etruscan sculptures, drawings by Fragonard and Degas, antique bracelets.

“How can I possibly choose?”

“Only one.”

“But who will you give the others to?”

The room laughs. He is standing across the table from me, waiting, and I realize he’s already chosen. Without saying it, among these objects, there’s one he wants me to pick. I choose two. A drawing and an Alexandrian gold serpent bracelet. A simple bracelet, exquisite. I can tell by a faint light in his eyes it’s the one. I slip it on my wrist.

My mother touches my elbow. Dinner is ready, and do I want to call everyone in?

There are toasts that night, one from Yusha, who strikes a spoon lightly on his glass. He stands and recalls the evening years ago when he first met Jack at Merrywood. Yusha tells the story of how I instructed him ahead of time to make especially fine daiquiris and to not argue about Democrat vs. Republican or Harvard vs. Yale. Jack doesn’t glance at me. He is listening to Yusha. But I keep feeling he will look my way to let me know he too remembers that time in our life—that evening of the Dancing Class when we talked about fingernails soaked green from the darkroom solvents and I asked him to help button my gloves. I wonder if he remembers. His gaze is fixed on Yusha, who is still speaking. Jack’s face looks older, fragile somehow, a faint tension along the jaw, something I haven’t noticed for a while. I realize then that he’s going out of his way not to look at me, so I stare at him until he does. It’s quick, his glance, but his eyes are just so soft before he looks away again. I’m aware of the vaulted shape of the room, a room I’ve sat in a thousand nights before, for dinner parties like this one, the dark beams and cathedral-like pitch of the ceiling that seems all at once steep, like we are falling through a rush of time and space, and we are not significant—not one of the twelve of us sitting around this beautifully arrayed table with its candlelight, silver, and china, our unfinished meal, crumbs scattered, knives and forks set against the plates to signal completion. There’s a loose shadowed imprint of water on the tablecloth where the pitcher was sweating, and through the windows there is night now, and I’m unable to distinguish the shapes demarcating sea from land from sky. I feel a chill, like the temperature has dropped, a window open somewhere in the house that pulls the damp night in.

“Mr. President,” Yusha says, raising his glass. “I want to congratulate you. You’ve been a very good president. I’m glad you had your wedding here in Newport. I’m glad you’re celebrating your wedding anniversary here tonight with Jackie. And I must remind you: If you hadn’t gotten engaged to my stepsister, neither one of you would be in the White House, and I wouldn’t have had a chance to stay in the White House. So I have to thank you for that.”

Jack laughs and raises his glass.

—

The sun is cool and bright for the next few days, the sky sharp. We go to Mass on Sunday at St. Mary’s Church, where we were married ten years before. There’s a crowd on Spring Street as we leave. Jack waves to them, that shining smile, then strides to the convertible and takes the wheel. We drive off. He slows at a corner where a small group of nuns stand.

He calls out to greet them.

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