Page 151 of Jackie

“I’m just waking up.”

“It’s okay,” Caroline says solemnly. “I’ll take care of you. It’s time for you to come.”

“I love you, sweetheart. I’m coming.”

I meet with Dorothy Schiff from the New York Post because Bobby has asked me to. He wants her endorsement.

“Bobby’s not what people think,” I tell her. “They call him ruthless. But he’s the opposite. He’s been so good to my children and me. He is kind, and the thing about Bobby is that he can’t not tell the truth. So he might seem ruthless. Because the truth is exactly that.”

—

When the phone rings that afternoon, and it’s Bobby, I assume he wants to know about the meeting with Dorothy. A bright day. The leaves on the turn, the light with that longer slant in it I love. Miss Shaw has taken John out, and Caroline will be home from school in an hour. But Bobby is not calling to ask about the meeting with Dorothy. He is calling because he wants me to know what’s happened. It will be in the papers tomorrow, and he wants me to hear it from him.

“Just tell me,” I say.

“Mary Meyer was shot and killed walking the towpath beside the canal.”

The walls peel; the ceiling is an eggshell.

“They have the man who did it. They’re sure.”

“If they’re saying they’re sure, they must not be.”

“Jackie—”

“I’m glad you let me know.”

Hanging up, I remember, of all things, the dress. The bedraggled mess of layered chiffon Mary wore that night she went out in the snow and came back soaking wet.

Mary used to love to walk the towpath in the middle of the day. She’d work on a painting in the morning, then go down to the canal before lunch. Remembering this, I don’t see Mary in an oversize shirt streaked with paint, walking along the canal. I see her in that dress, a little tipsy, her face smeared with mascara and tears, that woman who wouldn’t stay on the course the world had laid out.

—

A week later, more details are released. We learn that the murderer was a Black man. He claimed he was fishing when the police came after him for something he didn’t even know had taken place.

“He didn’t do it,” I say to Bobby the next time he stops by.

“He shot her twice.”

“Someone shot her twice.”

“Jackie, don’t. There’s nothing behind this. They found him wandering in the woods, the fly of his pants unzipped.”

“He claimed the police did that to him.”

“He shot her twice,” he says again, as if that somehow provesit.

“Don’t be a fool, Bobby, or imagine I am. Mary knew too much, and they killed her for it.”

He stares at me, and for a moment I regret being so direct. But I’m right and he knows it. That man didn’t kill Mary, but Mary is dead, and somehow we all played a part in that.

It will get brushed under the rug. There’s too much at stake right now. The election is coming. Martin Luther King, Jr., just won the Nobel Peace Prize. Rumors are bubbling up that Khrushchev will be deposed. Mary and the Black man will be lost to all that. The man will sit in prison, go to trial. More than likely he’ll be convicted, and the layers of what really happened will just drift away.

…

On November 3, Bobby is elected to the Senate and Lyndon Johnson wins the presidency.

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