Page 181 of Jackie

“Yes, she’s very happy.”

“Perfect. That’s the only important thing.”

Caroline’s reception was in Hyannis Port. There was a dance floor, a tent, Japanese lanterns, and a thousand flowers, like the world had come into bloom. That night, Teddy raised a glass and called me “that extraordinary gallant woman—Jack’s only love.”

As Carly Simon sang, the fog rolled in off the sea. The fireworks were suffused in that fog, muted flashes of light and color like summer lightning, tethered to the earth.

—

I wanted you to see it. So many things I’ve wanted you to see.

Earlier that day, Teddy had walked Caroline down the aisle and given her away. Afterward, on the church steps, I stood with your brother and watched our daughter in a cloud of white organza, as a sea of people flooded in around her. I could not escape the sense that she was being lifted off, wrapped in the hands of an unseen future already woven through the summer air. The bouquet of orchids in her hand, the glint of pearl and diamond earrings, once a gift from you to me. I watched our son blow his sister a kiss as she glanced back to smile at me, before lowering her head into the waiting car. I was still standing with Teddy at the top of those steps. He waved to the crowd, and I let him carry the moment for us, as the car with Caroline in it slowly pulled away. I let my head rest on Teddy’s shoulder, and I looked through my tears to the stone at our feet, just to hold that image of our daughter—the bold, shining strength she had become—heading into her own life. I wanted it fast in my mind.

I told you once, Jack: These are the pieces we’re made of—births, marriages, deaths—these things that happen to anyone, these ordinary moments of a life.

—

I wake after three, Marta shaking me to say my friend Joe Armstrong has just arrived.

“I brought you a present,” Joe says.

“No gifts!”

“It’s just a cassette. The recording of a Beatles song, ‘When I’m Sixty-Four.’ ”

“I don’t know that one.” I take the cassette, walk over to the stereo, and plunk it in.

“It’s from 1967,” Joe says.

“Well, sixty-four was old age then.”

We lean on the edge of the sofa together and listen until the song has played through. Then I take his hand and pretend to be earnest.

“I’ll always feed you, Joe, and I’ll always need you. Even when I’m eighty-four. Now, come and meet my house.”

I introduce him to the kitchen, the sixteen-burner Vulcan stove.

“Perfect for someone who barely cooks,” I say. The fridge is covered with photographs of the children, the grandchildren, and there is one of me with Maurice. We walk through the dining room. In the library, I gesture toward the long shelves of books. “These are my other best friends.”

He inclines his head, a mock bow.

“I’ve been rereading Vasari’s Lives of the Artists,” I say. “There’s a wonderful chapter on how Da Vinci would walk through city streets where caged birds were sold. He’d buy the birds, just to set them free.”

“You and I need a street like that,” Joe says, “and a new project, since we’ve finished saving the ballet.”

“You love ballet now, don’t you?” I say. “Almost as much as I love my new favorite Beatles song.” I smile at him. “I want to show you the orchard. John says the trees get shorter every year.”

—

The house is set on a rise overlooking Squibnocket Pond and a sweep of woods and fields strung through with old stone walls. As we walk the path to the beach, I tell him I love how tough things have to be in order to grow in this kind of soil—the pitch pine, the bayberry, the scrub oak—their maze of gnarled roots that snake down through the sand as it blows up around them. The salt rose too, which blooms through storms and cold, throwing its scent deep into the fall.

We stop at the rowboat pulled up to the dunes, its hull splintered. I take off my sneakers and leave them on the thwart.

“Have you named it?” Joe asks.

“The boat?”

“Yes.”

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