Page 154 of Jackie

By the makeshift stage in the field at Runnymede, thousands have gathered in the bright-soaked meadow where the Magna Carta was signed, that first written document that sought to balance power with law. Justice, fairness, the rights of the people. Tree-blossom stuff is adrift on the air.

Macmillan speaks first. His calm voice floats over the field. He wrote to me soon after Jack died about being wounded in the Battle of the Somme. Shot, he fell and lay for hours among the dead. When his comrades came for him, they found him alive and took him from that place, but he was never able to escape the sense that it was wrong for him to live and leave the dead behind. He could not escape the sense that he had failed them.

“But this,” he had written, “what has happened to you and (in its way) to all of us. How can we accept it? How can we explain it? Why did God allow it?…Can there really be a God?”

Those words rise in me now, and I suddenly understand I cannot get up and say the brief remarks I’d planned. I cannot stand on that platform overlooking the field where King John met the barons and signed the Magna Carta. Neither side kept to the terms. Less than a year later, they met again in war, and King John was killed by those same men. Because violence is tidal. Violence does not end. It spills over and soaks, one generation into the next.

I lean over to Bobby. “I can’t do this.”

“You can.”

“No.”

It’s not that I’m too weak, I could explain. If anything, it’s the opposite. There is simply too much of me now. This jagged, unbridled intensity.

—

“Maybe that intensity is what you always were,” Onassis remarks when I tell him about that day at Runnymede. Early June. He’s come to New York. He’s invited me for dinner again, and here we are.

“I couldn’t bear to stand in that field and say beautiful things when all I can see now is how hate, and the violence it creates, is always there.”

“That isn’t all that’s there.”

I tell him about an argument I recently had with Bob McNamara over Vietnam. McNamara’s been quietly pushing me to align with Johnson.

“Of course they want your support,” Onassis says.

“Johnson takes credit for work Jack did on civil rights. It enrages Bobby. Then they ship more troops to Vietnam and blame Jack for his part. Which is unfair. Jack always felt that conflict could only end badly.”

Onassis nods, listening.

“There’s not a civilized nation in the world,” I say, “that talks about its civilizing mission as grandly as America does.”

The first-course plates have been cleared. McNamara and I did not leave on good terms after that argument. Two days later, he sent over a stuffed tiger as a gift for John. I’m making a watercolor of a tiger now to thank him but feeling somehow sick about it. Like I’m back on that stage, playing a role.

I dust a few crumbs off the tablecloth.

More and more often, Onassis seems to have reasons to be in the city. He stays at The Pierre. He’ll phone me a few weeks before. Mention he’s coming to New York on business. He’ll ask if there’s a night I might be free.

“I’ve brought something for you,” he says now.

“You shouldn’t do that.”

“It’s small.”

He withdraws a slim book from his jacket pocket. A collection of poems by the Greek poet Cavafy. “You’ve read him?” he asks.

“Only a few things,” I say. “Thank you.” I open the book. He tells me that much of Cavafy’s work has roots in the historical and mythological past, and while Cavafy believed in art for art’s sake, he often worked politics into his poems. Then, almost as an afterthought, Onassis remarks that pre-Socratic philosophers believed that the soul was born out of the sea, and the sea’s mist was the link between the earth and sun.

“I love that,” I say.

“I thought you would.”

“I’m planning to read Kazantzakis this summer.”

“Which book?”

“Report to Greco.”

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