Page 91 of Jackie

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Days later, when Jack gives his State of the Union address, I sit in the balcony. The air in the high-ceilinged room is cold. I can feel the stiff curl of my hair against my cheek. “I always wanted the helm of Hades,” I told Kenneth as he styled it that morning. “The one that confers invisibility.”

Kenneth laughed. “I don’t think that’s in your cards today.”

The floor seats are filled. Lady Bird sits with me as Jack speaks from the podium about public service and the nation’s courage during the missile crisis. He calls for a commitment to educate every child and to strengthen fundamental American rights—the right to counsel, healthcare, and, most essential, “the most precious and powerful right in the world, the right to vote in a free election.”

He lets a beat of silence fall.

To me, it’s the most cogent speech he’s given since taking office. He weaves disparate issues together in deft ways. He balances the accomplishments of the past year with his emergent vision for the next. There’s strength in how he stands, how he talks, in his eyes. His voice cool. The embers of that early rage have cohered into a new resolution. Jack is fiercely logical. He always has been. Competitive, but also strategic. Now, though, it feels that something new has crystallized—not simply raw ambition or political calculation but some new bright grain of belief, born from ideals as well as failure. Over these last months, that quiet faith has merged into his rhetoric. He’s not a man who likes to be sideswiped by feeling, ever. He doesn’t trust it. Perhaps because it already runs deep. But as I watch him speak that day, I understand he’s begun to grasp how passion, when it comes from a place of integrity, can be leveraged to invoke change.

…

Waves of morning nausea. I’ve felt it every day for the past two weeks. It hits out of nowhere. I skip coffee, eat dry toast or sip ginger ale to take the edge off.

“Good morning, George,” I hear Jack say to his valet. I feel his weight shift, legs swing to the floor. I pull the blankets up. He rummages through the papers, I hear the distant rush of water running into a bath.

At eight, Miss Shaw brings in the children. Their little feet and voices, then a splash.

“That was my duck!” John cries.

“There are five more,” Jack says. “Here, they’re all up. And we’ll find that other one. What about you, Buttons, you’re not too old for a duck, are you?”

I slip out of bed. In the bathroom, the children have lined plastic ducks along the tub edge. The cables and memos Jack was reading before they came in are soaked. The ink bleeds.

They stay with him in the bedroom as he gets dressed. They lie on the floor, faces propped in their hands, watching cartoons. John rolls from one end of the room to the other until he strikes a hard surface, a bedpost, his father’s leg, then he rolls back. I sit in the rocking chair I had repadded for Jack’s back, as Caroline pulls him away from breakfast down to their exercise routine on the floor. They climb over him, their bodies wrapping his, until he has to leave for work. I should tell him soon. It’s been four weeks. I’m afraid, though. I don’t want to tell him, or anyone, yet.

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“Mary,” I ask my secretary, Mary Gallagher, later that morning, “would you say I’ve done enough as First Lady?”

“More than enough.”

“Then now that the Mona Lisa is behind us, I’m taking the veil.”

I don’t tell her why. I tell Jack the following weekend when we go to New York to see Lee. After Sunday Mass, as we walk up Park Avenue, I tell him my period is five weeks late. For now, I tell him, I don’t want anyone else to know. He doesn’t break his stride, but he is smiling.

“You’ll have to stop riding,” he says.

“Luckily it’s winter.”

He pauses on the corner, catches my arm to keep me on the curb as the traffic flows by.

“And no water-skiing, Jackie.”

“Or tightrope-walking.”

“I mean it. You have to be careful.”

“We can still take walks.”

“Nothing too strenuous.”

“Fresh air is good.”

“You can’t get chilled.”

“And not too many teas,” I say. He laughs.

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