Page 125 of Jackie

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Take off your glasses, Jackie.

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Yesterday, in the rooms on the seventeenth floor of Bethesda, Arthur Schlesinger told me I was your “full and inseparable partner in the most brilliant and gay and passionate adventure” he has ever known.

You would have smiled. You might have made a joke, rolled your eyes. You hated sentiment like that.

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On a new sheet of paper, a list of things to put in the coffin:

- Inlaid cuff links

- Scrimshaw with the presidential seal

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There’s a terrible noise from down the hall. Someone is sobbing. Shouting. Bobby, I realize. From the Lincoln Bedroom.

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The first night we spent in this house, you slept in that bedroom where your brother is crying now. You threw yourself on Lincoln’s bed and yelled with joy that you had won and this was ours. You cried out at the ceiling like the joy would explode from inside you, like you were shrieking across time to the ghosts of all the men before you who had lived and led and died and worked and aged in this terrible house.

To think I almost didn’t go with you to Dallas.

What if I had been here or out riding in Virginia, or somewhere else. Not with you.

Raining now. Miss Shaw brought the children to me this morning after their breakfast. John climbed into the bed, cried for a bit, then asked about his birthday and when the party would be. Caroline came in pushing that huge toy giraffe you gave her. Jack, she was so quiet, like a clock gone still. Her face is not the same. I can feel it. A distance in her eyes, the incandescent wreckage of her face, like she knows something now about the word forever. In less than a week, our daughter will be six. This morning she wrapped her arms around me, pressing close, like she could dig all the way in. Miss Shaw told her last night before bed, and Caroline asked Miss Shaw if God would give you a job, since you always had so much to do here. Miss Shaw told her God had already made you an angel to watch over us and that you would look after Patrick, who is lonely up there in heaven.

Do you remember what I told you, Jack, when we lost Patrick? Do you remember how I said losing you would be the one thing I could not bear—

…

“He’s dead, isn’t he?” Caroline whispers. At the private Mass in the East Room, she kneels with me on the pew by the coffin. When I bow my head, Caroline bows hers. When my lips move, she half-follows, trying to keep up with the words. I stand, and my daughter takes my hand. She looks up at me. I see Jack’s face in her face. Someone is sobbing. Pam. Bill Walton puts an arm around her. The others try to manage their grief. If they can’t, they recuse themselves to the Green Room. I look for Clint.

“Mr. Hill, would you arrange for the children to be taken out this afternoon? To lunch with my mother, then for a drive.”

“Yes, Mrs. Kennedy.”

“Oh, and, Mr. Hill?”

“Yes?”

“Please tell Mr. West I want to go to the president’s office.”

I wait while Clint speaks to the other agents. Then he walks with me in silence to the Oval Office, where Mr. West is waiting. The new carpet I’d ordered was installed while we were in Dallas. Jack’s things are being packed up. I make a mental inventory: photographs, a small clock, scrimshaw.

“Do you remember how much he loved this desk, Mr. Hill? How excited he was when the children played hide-and-seek with the little trapdoor?”

I rest my hand on the rocking chair, and I’m startled when it moves.

Out the window, I can see the trampoline, the sandbox, the treehouse.

“Mr. West.”

“Yes, Mrs. Kennedy.”

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