Page 92 of Jackie

“What about the March dinner dance for Eugene Black?” he says.

“I’m always up for a good dinner dance.”

“And the Emancipation Proclamation fete?”

“Absolutely.”

“King isn’t coming,” he says.

I nod. Pam had told me. But I don’t tell him I already knew. “Did they give a reason?”

“King says as long as young Black men are being arrested for sit-ins and protests—”

“He wants you to move forward with a bill,” I say quietly, but in the blare and swirl of the city, I feel the air between us tense.

—

We’re down in Palm Beach with Joe for a few days in February when I bring up Mary Meyer. Tony Bradlee had mentioned how pleased her sister, Mary, was to be invited to the dinner dance in March. Which surprised me. Mary wasn’t on my list.

Jack and I are out for a drive in the Lincoln, windows rolled halfway down, sunshine moving through the car. Green hedges, manicured lawns, and low stucco houses flow by.

“Jack, I didn’t invite Mary.”

“Is her name on the list?”

“You didn’t put it there?”

He shrugs, and I know then the talk I’ve heard about Jack and Mary Meyer is true.

“You and I both enjoy Mary’s company,” he says.

I feel a surge of rage. He makes a turn, heading back toward Palm Beach. Sunlight blinding off the hood. We drive in silence. There was a look I saw exchanged between Jack and Mary the last time we were all together. Mary had come to the Residence with Tony. She was wearing a shirtdress and those hammered-gold earrings she often wore, which seemed too large for her face but always made you look again. A year after we were married, Jack and I moved next door to Mary and her then-husband, Cord Meyer. Jack had known Mary since they were in school together at Choate. Mary and I would sometimes take walks through Georgetown and along the canal path. Then Mary’s son was struck by a car and killed. He was nine. Her marriage split up. We’d seen her less after that. Until recently.

I unroll the window farther and close my eyes.

—

The following day, I strike her name from the guest list.

“I had Pam call her,” I tell Jack, “to explain our space constraints. Eugene Black and his wife invited so many of their own friends, but since the dinner is in their honor, we really have no choice. Mary is still coming for the dancing at ten, so you can end it with her face-to-face.”

He stares at me. He doesn’t say anything.

“It’s not that I can’t handle it, Jack. Don’t you see? It becomes unbearable to me when I think about what Caroline and John will have to endure when it gets out, because it will, someday, get out. You know that. And in my mind, I see their faces. The burning disappointment and the shame. I think about that.”

He sits down, silent.

“It’s not the women I’m afraid of, Jack. For someone as canny as you, you seem blind about this. I find it stunning you don’t realize that someday, some writer, like a Mailer, is going to come along and blow the whole house down. And Caroline will come to you, or to me, and she will say, Is it true? Or, worse, she will look at you differently and won’t say anything at all.”

I pick up the seating chart I’ve been working on, my pen and notebook, and walk out.

Jack

Two days later, he finds the photograph she left on his desk. Under a folder but positioned intentionally with the edge peeking out. She wanted him to find it. A photograph of her father holding hands with another woman while her mother dressed in riding clothes sits on the fence next to them, staring fixedly away.

—

He’d seen the photograph before. Jackie showed it to him once, years ago. She said that by the time it was taken, her mother had decided it didn’t matter what her father did. She’d accepted her marriage for what it was. He can’t quite remember the words Jackie used when she told him this. Only that, years later, she came across that photograph and understood everything she thought she’d known as a child in a new and awful light.

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