Page 47 of Jackie

“He’s grown too dull for her. I think she’s going to run off with a Polish count. My sister, the princess. Does that seem surprising?” I look out the window. The air in the car is altered. The news has thrown him. Divorce. The light turns green.

—

I take him to see a house I’ve found on N Street NW in Georgetown. Three stories, Federal style.

“It leans a bit to one side,” I say as we walk over. “The stairs creak.”

“Sounds like me,” he says.

“It used to belong to Oatsie.” He’ll like that. Oatsie is Marion Leiter. She’s close friends with the British spy novelist Ian Fleming. Jack loved Casino Royale.

In the house on N Street, Jack seems smitten with an old doorknob. We leave the realtor and her assistant downstairs.

“I think this will be the nursery,” I say.

“We haven’t agreed to buy it.”

“You fell in love with the doorknob.”

He reaches for me then. He touches my waist. An unexpected tenderness. “I like this crooked creaking house you’ve chosen, Jackie.” He slides his hand around my back and draws me to him.

…

I’m with his parents in Hyannis Port in July when the phone rings. Yusha. Calling to wish me a happy birthday.

“I’d like a few more days of twenty-seven,” I say.

He was in New York the week before, he says. He dropped by Black Jack’s apartment.

“He didn’t look right, Jackie. He’s lost weight. He can’t keep food down.”

“He must have been drinking?”

“No, actually. That’s why I’m mentioning it. He wasn’t.”

I fly to New York and talk my father into going for tests at the hospital. I hold his hand as the doctor explains it’s late-stage liver cancer. Chemotherapy is the only option.

I call Lee.

“Too much jai alai,” I say, “scotch, and Pan Am stewardesses.”

Lee sighs. “Should I come home?”

“You should if you want to.”

“I want to if I should, Jacks. You’ll tell me, won’t you? You’ll know. Tell me when I should come, and I’ll be there.”

But I don’t know. My father fails so fast that by the time I reach the hospital after getting the doctors’ call, he’s gone. Only moments ago, they tell me. My name was the last word he spoke. Is that true? Or is that what they tell all the daughters who aren’t there in time?

Once, on a carriage ride through Central Park when Lee and I were young, ice cream dripped on our dresses and our Sunday gloves. Lee began to cry, afraid of what our mother would say when Black Jack brought us back, how angry she’d be. Lee sobbed. Our father couldn’t understand what she was afraid of. I tried to explain. He just threw back his dark head and laughed, his laughter so bold and free I felt my breath cut, and from then on, I understood that a glove was just a glove and what mattered was the decadent sunshine, the gorgeous midsummer patterns of sky and park and city, the heat and the green. What mattered was the sugar and cream dissolving on my tongue, the sweet sticky aftermath of that pleasure on our lips and wrists.

After the funeral, I tell Lee, “You should take what you want of Daddy’s things. All I want is the desk.” The desk is mahogany, French Empire style, with ormolu hardware and a slant front. “You can have everything else, Lee.”

“I don’t want anything,” my sister says.

—

When Jack leaves again for the campaign trail, I drive him to the airport. The air is humid still, and warm, but we are into the fall, and the slant of light has changed.

---