Page 78 of Jackie

A blunt silence. Several heads turn in our direction, but Khrushchev only laughs.

“You are charming,” he says.

—

He is brutal, though, to Jack, when they meet the next day to discuss Berlin. “That bone in my throat” is how Khrushchev describes the divided city, a Western enclave deep in communist East Germany. He refuses to discuss a nuclear détente between the United States and the Soviet Union. He turns Jack’s arguments around, aiming well-placed shots to underscore Jack’s inexperience. When Jack says that a nuclear exchange would kill seventy million people in ten minutes, Khrushchev shrugs and coolly remarks that a Soviet treaty with East Germany by year-end is inevitable. He demands that the United States withdraw from West Berlin. If not, he threatens, he’ll cut off Allied access to the city.

“I did it all wrong,” Jack tells me afterward in our hotel room. “Everything I’d been warned about his tactics flew out of my head.”

“Macmillan told you he bluffs,” I say.

“There was no bluff. He savaged me and, because of Cuba, he could.”

On the flight to London, Jack talks to Rusk, O’Donnell, and Powers. I try to close my mind to the brooding mood on the plane. Soon we’ll land in England. I’ll fly on to Greece. Jack will stay for a night to confer with Macmillan, then return to the States. I miss the children. I wish I was flying home to them. Through the window, the gray sky floods away underneath.

…

Clint is there when I land in Athens.

“It’s so good to see you again, Mr. Hill.”

He takes his place in my shadow as we walk from the plane. Evening. The air is warm, and I feel my skin release to it.

The prime minister and his wife welcome us. To the side hovers a group of fidgeting boys dressed as Evzones, the elite Greek military guard. I kneel by the smallest boy and say hello in Greek. He smiles shyly, reaching for my hand.

The sea is cyan blue, outstretched below the villa in Kavouri. I swim that first night before dinner. The next morning, the yacht that will take us through the islands is moored offshore. Fishing boats and small craft dart around it. The Greek Navy pushes them off.

We embark for Epidaurus. The town has been whitewashed to greet us, thyme and flowers strewn through the streets. In the amphitheater on the eastern coast, we sit on a two-thousand-year-old bench and watch a rehearsal of Sophocles’s Electra, that play about the violence of justice and regret, the story of a brother and sister who murder their mother to avenge their father’s death. The title role is played by a young actress—dark hair, slight, her face with a curious intensity that seems to magnetize the open space. Watching that familiar play unfold in the ancient, brilliant light on a dirt-stone stage, where it was first performed thousands of years before, feels uncanny, almost transcendent. Who is to say what endures?

“What did you think of the play, Mr. Hill?” I ask afterward as we walk down to the harbor.

“I liked it,” he says, “although I’m afraid I didn’t understand a word.”

I laugh. “I didn’t really either. Apparently, there’s another Epidaurus. The prime minister’s wife told me. A sunken city off the coast, ruins just meters below the surface. It’s a short drive from here.” We turn a corner and start across an open square. “Mr. Hill, do you think we might shift our itinerary this afternoon?”

He looks at his supervisor, Agent Jefferies, walking ahead of us. Jefferies is a play-by-the-book kind of man. He doesn’t like the little schedule changes I try to weave in here and there to keep breathing room in my day.

“What would you like to do, Mrs. Kennedy?” Clint asks.

“I’d love to see that other Epidaurus. And perhaps swim there.” I feel him hesitate. I know what I’m asking for, and I know it’s too much. There would need to be an advance. “It’s all right,” I say. “We won’t do that.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Kennedy.”

“Maybe, though, could we bend time a bit this afternoon? Enough for a short swim and half an hour to water-ski?”

He smiles. “That I can do.”

I ski off the back of a small motorboat. Clint sits in the stern, watching as I cut over the wake, carving long tails of spray that rise and fall through the air. The light is sharp, the space so bright and open it’s as if the sky is hurtling away. I drop the line and the boat circles back. Clint helps me in.

“Will you give it a try, Mr. Hill?”

“There wasn’t much water where I grew up.”

I laugh. “This summer, in Hyannis Port, I want to teach you to water-ski.”

As the small boat picks up speed, heading toward the yacht, the thought strikes through me, a hot current. I don’t want to go back. It startles me. It’s not that I don’t miss home. I miss the children intensely. Little voices, faces, hands. And Jack. But I love, so much, the rush of freedom I feel here as the boat flies across that wide expanse.

—

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