Page 86 of Jackie

In Georgetown that night, we play our way through the dinner like nothing’s amiss. As soon as we return to the White House, Jack leaves for a debrief. He comes home late, after midnight.

“What’s wrong, Jack?”

“Let’s go to sleep, kid.” He smiles at me, but the smile does not feel true.

—

The next day, a new clip in the air. I bring the children to see Jack at the Oval Office. I want to ask about Cuba, the missile sites, Soviet ships spotted offshore, what choices he’s weighing now. I know there are at least two: air strikes on the missile sites, or a naval quarantine to stop ships carrying weapons bound for Cuba. But if the United States intervenes, will Khrushchev use it as an excuse to move on his longtime threat to take Berlin? What then? Another round of sparring, or war?

We watch the children scramble over the rug. They play hide-and-seek around the desk. John does a somersault. Off-kilter. Caroline just stands there, still for a moment, watching her brother, the perfect slope of her cheek, a lovely smudge of sunlight on the bone.

What will they inherit?

I glance at Jack. His eyes are on me.

“This,” he says. “Caroline and John. They’re what I bring into that Cabinet Room, to make the right decision, a sane decision, while the whole fucking world’s on its ear.”

“Tell me what’s happening, Jack.”

“At this point, there’s nothing I can tell you.”

I look at him, wait. Then he says, “I knew it would take time to reach a solution. It never struck me there might not be one.”

—

I take the children and Joe to Glen Ora, as planned. Jack flies to Chicago, as planned. But within a day Clint informs me Jack’s returning to the White House with a head cold. A pretense. Jack calls to say he wants us home in Washington that afternoon. He wants me to host a small dinner. That evening he acts like his usual self—peppering our friends with questions about Frank Sinatra, Lord Beaverbrook, and that wild photograph of the model lying on a white bearskin, sucking her thumb. He says nothing about Cuba or Khrushchev.

Later, he tells me he’s approved a naval quarantine of ships passing into Cuba.

“A blockade?”

“A blockade’s an act of war. We can’t call it that.” The following evening, he says, he’ll make an address to the nation, announcing that the United States will not allow Soviet shipment of any offensive military equipment to Cuba. He’ll call on Khrushchev publicly to end this. He’ll cite the 1930s as a clear example that aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged, will lead to war.

People have begun to leave the city. Growing fears of a nuclear attack. It feels like everything and everyone around us is peeling away. The sense of time resting on a blade.

“It’s time for you to go, Jackie,” he says. “Move the children closer to the shelter.”

“We’re going to stay with you.”

“You’re not afraid?”

“I am afraid, because you are.” He won’t like me saying it. I say it anyway, and I see the split second of his anger because I’ve acknowledged what he doesn’t want to feel.

“If you’re afraid you should go,” he says.

“I am going to stay, Jack.”

—

From then on, there is no waking or sleeping. One day flows into the next. When he comes home for a nap or a rest, I lie down with him. When he calls, I go to his office. He’ll pull on his coat, and we’ll walk. Sometimes he talks, other times we walk in silence. One evening at dinner, he tells me that while taking a swim in the pool he kept thinking of how every decision he’d make in the next twelve hours would set in motion the following twelve, then the twelve after that, and it would just go on that way as long as the threat of the crisis continued. As he floated in the pool, he says, he remembered a painting he made years ago, in Brooklyn during the 1960 campaign. A watercolor of boats in Sheepshead Bay. He remembered the feeling he had working the pigment on the paper as he painted the wind, how he wanted to capture that wind in the landscape so it bled through the abstract shapes of boats and piers, their outlines half dissolved, because the motion of the world did not differentiate, and all we imagine to be permanent, solid, is always on the verge of being swept away.

—

John wakes up the next day with a fever. By noon, it’s over 100 degrees. While Jack is in meetings, I get John into the car and take him to the doctor.

—

Soviet tankers approach the U.S. quarantine cordon in the waters near Cuba.

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