Jack's Widow (10 page)

“You could have got out early when he treated you abominably at the beginning. But even when he left you in the lurch at parties, or flew off for a little R and R on the Riviera, you stuck with him. Then you got lucky, really lucky, because whatever else he was doing, this boy went all the way. So you became the most famous woman in the world after the Queen of En gland.”

Lee was circling the room now, pretending to acknowledge the crowds and curtsying to her elder sister.

“And then all Momma and I had to do was answer all those boring questions about your eyes, your clothes, your hair.

“So he had a mistress…or many. At least you know now,” she said, holding up the tabloid with that day’s piece of scandal. “And he wasn’t faithful to her either!”

“How can you be so cynical? After we went to the White House, then after Patrick…I really thought things were better between us.”

“Then you shouldn’t have left him for days at a time and come cruising on Ari’s yacht.”

So she was still riled up about that, thought Jackie, just because the Greek had showered her with the most expensive jewels and not Lee.

For the sake of peace she changed the subject.

“How do I get over the past? I feel I don’t know who is who and what is what anymore. I don’t know who I can trust, who is my friend—”

“Jackie.” Her sister’s voice was more serious now. “Apart from me and Yusha, you don’t really have friends, remember? You never did. You’re the cool one, the one who needs nobody. Yes, you make all the right noises, but apart from me and some of the others in the family, you haven’t ever really bothered.”

At this Jackie became incensed.

“Of course I have friends, I just never needed ‘friends’ to get me out of scrapes, to cover for me when I was sneaking out of the house and seeing another man. Correction, other men!”

“I don’t have to listen to this.” Lee stood up. “You’re not the First Lady anymore. It’s late, I’m jet-lagged, I’m going.”

“Stay right where you are.” Jackie moved to the door. Taller and bigger, she stood with her arm across the doorjamb.

“I want you to tell me—”

“Honestly, I just want to get out of here. He played around but he’s dead; you’re alive. Deal with it.”

Jackie stiffened; she would not let her pass.

“Think of it this way.” The women were as close as possible without touching. Lee continued, “He was just looking for a pulse. Something he didn’t have at home.” Then she made as if to duck under her sister’s arm.

Jackie automatically stopped her by grabbing her wrist.

For a moment it seemed like they had gone back in time and were a two-and a six-year-old pulling each other’s hair and wrestling on the ground.

“Leave me alone, Jackie, I’ve told you I knew nothing.” Lee eased her arm from her sister’s viselike grip. “But I always suspected him.”

“So what stopped you from telling me?”

“At exactly
which
presidential moment was I to whisper my worries in your ear?

“Hell, at that fund-raiser there was nothing clearer. Marilyn was making her move and she was succeeding. But you were playing the Fairy Queen, while he was eating the Sugar Plum. Be honest, you could have been brave and tried to get him in line. Pity you were so busy with the West Wing flowers you couldn’t see straight. Ooh, and I forgot, nothing sordid ever happens in Camelot. Still, why don’t you ruin the rest of your life hating everybody, sitting here avoiding everyone you know and reading all this.” She pointed at the paper on the floor. “Yes, it seems like most of them knew what was going on, but he was in charge, he was the boss. That’s life. I expect lots of them do think that you were cold and aloof, Miss Perfect, Miss White-gloves. And they blame you,” she hissed. “What a pity it is that I am the only one in the world who knows that you
are
capable of passion,” she said, rubbing her arm with feeling.

“I won’t enjoy watching you drive yourself mad sitting here night after night wondering who let him stay where, who introduced him to whom, who was sent out to buy them presents—yes, face it, there must have been lots of those.”

Jackie knew that she had gone too far by physically attacking her sister and she couldn’t altogether blame her for enjoying her discomfort. Yet her rant had sparked a brainstorm. If anyone could, Guy Steavenson might be able to find out who had been Jack’s pimp. And who else had been his girl.

“If you know more than you’re telling me I’ll find out in the end,” she shouted at Lee.

Lee stopped and turned: “You know, those bullets could have killed you too. You’ve got two adorable children, tons of money, and every male from here to the Euphrates in love with you. Help yourself and for heaven’s sake go and see a shrink. I can think of no more suitable case for treatment.”

Over the next two weeks, Jackie forced herself to go out with the cream of the Manhattan elite, “the ladies who lunch.”

Now that she had the sympathy vote, they were more likely to share their misfortunes with her than before.

Without giving away her interest, she made it her business to find out if they were in therapy. It was while sitting in a chair at Kenneth’s, her hairdresser, that she finally heard one talk about a good psychoanalyst.

The woman had married into one of New York’s old-money families. Her husband’s high status and wealth gave him, like many of his friends, the belief that he could indulge in inappropriate behavior at will.

“I had to get help—he has girlfriends. I discovered when I was eight months pregnant,” her friend whispered under the drying hood. Jackie had welcomed her into her private room at the salon for just such a chat.

“I thought that once I had the baby everything would return to normal. But no. His thrill is to get them to have lunch with him wearing no underwear, then they do it in the car. He likes the feel of leather…it’s disgusting. Mostly he heads out to the estate and does it on the way. Sometimes he gets back and takes another one out to dinner and does it all over again.

“He’s been seeing some of them for years. He gives them money, opens accounts for them at Tiffany.

“I can see what you are thinking…so why don’t I leave him?

“Well, there’s our son, Junior. And let’s face it, Jackie, who’s ever going to invite me over when I’m alone? Yes, I’m smart, I’ve got a degree, but by comparison to him, ‘no contacts, no class,’ as his mother always says.”

“So that’s why you started to see a psychoanalyst?” Jackie carefully inquired.

“Yes, there I can unburden myself. I can tell the doctor anything
and he can never, ever tell anyone else. Those are the rules,” she uttered brightly.

So Jackie made her decision, chose a man whose name she had heard mentioned favorably, and started twice-weekly visits just a five-minute walk from her home.

David Goadshem was handsome, black haired, and six foot three. He had the advantage of being from New York’s Lower East Side, coupled with the warmth of a Viennese mother whose family had actually known Dr. Freud before World War II.

His first job was to persuade her that the real Jackie was a strong, capable woman.

“For example, you have been describing over the last few weeks your ambivalence about going to the White House, then how you dealt with it. Don’t you see, in the end you took your demons, all the things you hated about the place, the protocol, the lack of privacy, and made them work to your advantage, you owned them.”

He asked her how she coped with the really bad moments.

“Well, as I did when I came here for the first time,” she said, smiling, “I preplan it, I ‘dream’ it. I imagine it so clearly, not just my part but how I am going to have to interact with others.”

He chuckled. “You may not be aware of it but this is a well-known way of handling all sorts of trauma. Some therapists almost hypnotize their patients to give them the courage to act in this way. It is a mental escape hatch. And you found it for yourself.”

As her confidence grew, he gave her “permission” to feel that she could deal as she wished with anyone she thought had betrayed her; she owed them nothing, “and that includes your in-laws.”

He also tried to explain the unaccountable urge some men had for forbidden sex rather than sexual love.

The therapy helped her immensely so Jackie figured that she owed it to her sister to perk up her ideas and arrange a family lunch for her before she, and her husband, the prince, returned to London.

On the morning of the lunch, one newspaper gave Jackie her first pummeling. A detailed article, tracking each time she had been ab
sent from the White House, almost blamed Jackie for the president’s many adulteries. It did not mention that these absences were often due to pregnancy, or the health of other members of the family, including the president’s own father.

It was the last straw.

At the lunch, at the end of her small speech wishing her sister farewell, Jackie announced that she was withdrawing from public life for a while.

As she saw Lee down to her car, more fans than ever clustered round the doorway of 1040 Fifth Avenue. Whatever the newspapers and magazines wrote, the Jackie effect lived on.

J
ackie wrote to Guy asking for help. Now that she had learned to unburden herself to her sychoanalyst, she found it therapeutic to put everything she felt, or suspected, down on paper.

As she had written that she had withdrawn from social life, he sent her a pair of powerful binoculars, as used by the CIA, to cheer her up. The message on his note concluded, “Look through these for now. I believe I will be able to help you look further when I get home.” He made her feel hopeful.

When she was bored she would train the binoculars on the waiting reporters and photographers, fifteen floors below. She took pleasure in frustrating the ones that she loathed, that she recognized from their head-and-shoulder snapshots tucked next to the bylines on the most aggressive news stories about her. She would wait inside until just after they had given up and gone home.

As for the ever-present photographers, it was silly, she knew, but she loved it when it rained. They got soaked, as no self-respecting doorman on Eighty-fifth Street would let them shelter under his awning. When there was a heavy shower she occasionally took the opportunity to escape, camouflaging herself with a trench coat,
headscarf, and large sunglasses. She knew that if a snapper was still hanging around, any picture he took would be like so many others already in the file, it would not be used.

Immaculately dressed in black (or occasionally white, chosen because it was the alternative color of mourning in many countries), the Jackie that had been emerging to attend the ballet, the opera, and some intimate, private lunches and dinners, folded her wings and crept back into her chrysalis.

The city missed her, the newspapers most of all.

Weeks turned into months and stories of Jack and his women still appeared, but none had the power to shock like his romance with M.M. Without new titillating details, or a glamorous photograph, the “Prezcapades” might begin on page one but soon ended up on the inside pages.

She assumed from Guy’s hopeful note that despite the fierce competition between the CIA and the FBI, he would be able to ascertain many more of Jack’s little secrets.

She recalled how intensely all the Kennedy men had disliked FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover. She had once bumped into the short, pugnacious man strutting into the White House as if he owned the place. At the time she had ascribed it to familiarity; he had after all worked for every president since Coolidge. But with hindsight she understood that the confident gait was the result of knowledge. He knew that of the three of them around the table, including the president and his brother, the attorney general, he, because he knew their secrets, held the most powerful hand.

Jackie yearned to see Guy. She hadn’t worked out what she was going to do when everything was revealed, but she felt that at the very least she wouldn’t lie awake and worry that she was being too kind to someone who had betrayed her trust. Her pride balked at that.

When he arrived he presented her with a large pot of caviar from his local Moscow store, gave her a quizzical look, went to the window, and tried out the binoculars for himself.

After slowly surveying the gaggle of photographers below, he returned them to her.

“I’ll get you a telescope next time,” he said.

“They are even more powerful and they will show you every wart, every pimple. With a bit of luck it’ll eventually make you lose interest in them all.”

She interrupted, “Or even better, they’ll lose interest in me.”

“And.” He only paused for a second for breath as if not acknowledging her comment. “The stars probably look very good from up here.”

She poured him a glass of white wine. As they chatted about his son’s school progress, and exchanged information about her latest trip to the Adriatic, she thought how handsome he looked. Even though she always told him to dress informally when he came around, he wore a navy suit. Years ago she had teased him that he bought a certain shade of pale blue shirt in Jermyn Street in London because they matched his eyes.

“I bought a couple when I was passing through,” he said, “to celebrate the promotion.”

After offering her congratulations she asked, what did it mean, would he have to leave Russia, had his paycheck doubled? She was interested in the agency. An old friend of her stepfather’s had once suggested she think about joining when she left college.

She had made an effort for him. She wore a simple wool sheath in a fine black and white houndstooth check. Her hair was gleaming and full. Her only adornment was her usual three-strand pearl necklace and matching earrings.

He did not comment on her hands, bare of her wedding or engagement ring.

“Instead of wasting time when I arrived yesterday I decided to take advantage of a friend. I found out that I could look at everything that J. Edgar has in his favorite, very large box file, the one marked
PRESIDENT OF THE USA
. So I got down to work.”

Her grin of grateful delight reminded him of the enthusiastic senator’s wife he had met in Prague.

“Believe it or not, he’s already got some stuff on the latest one, but dear lady, we are not interested in that.

“Before we start and I tell you what I’ve discovered, you’ve got to tell me how you want me to do this.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Well, supposing I find someone you really like is in there?”

“There are bound to be some friends, people that I
thought
were my friends…” Her voice trailed away to a whisper.

“Well, this is the moment when you really have to think about it.

“Most of the stories so far have been about dames at the lower end of the market. Now that I have been able to rummage among Mr. Hoover’s files, the situation is bound to change. After all, Jack had nothing against wellborn women, which means that we must expect to find some women more like yourself.”

“You mean my sister?” The minute she blurted it out she regretted it.

“Actually…” There was a long pause while he consulted his memory and even checked the small black notebook he always carried.

“No. Not so far. But I’ve only had a chance to give the files a quick look. I meant Nantucket, the Upper East Side, Newport, Ocean Drive, Vassar, Spence, Chapin, and so on. You’ve got through the worst, is this really what you want?”

She was impressed. He was being sensitive while also being completely businesslike.

She confessed about her paranoia; every time she met an attractive woman she imagined her making love to Jack. She explained her conjectures were driving her mad. Since she had failed to drive them out of her mind she felt that finally knowing everything would be better than not.

“Okay, so how do you feel about the boys, the jolly old friends who helped him? For instance, how do you feel about Deck now?”

“Well, of course I always knew that he was never really my friend. We were strangers washed up on the dirty, sodden fields of the JFK fiefdom.

“But I have to remember that he is Caroline’s godfather, there is still that link.

“I know that I should have had no expectation that he would ever be honest with me, I know this kind of
omertà,
this loyalty, is the way you men work, but he could have helped me so much.

“I was so nice to Deck…and his mad Irish sister. Always welcomed him in, often when I wanted to be alone with Jack and the children. I know it is naive of me to have expected him to behave in any other way, I just feel so used, so stupid.”

“But Jackie, just imagine what might have happened if Deck had told you what was going on. You might have left your husband and then you might never have done the things you have.

“Because you stayed in the marriage your husband became president; he could have never done that if you had left him. Then, by quite reasonably assuming that once he was in the White House he was a reformed man, you did wonders, some great things.”

“I’ve thought about that a lot. I guess if our marriage had ended he wouldn’t have become president but then I would not have had Caroline and John.” She glanced over at a new photograph on the demilune mahogany table; the picture featured both of them grinning, astride their ponies.

“Once we had Caroline I was in for the long haul.”

Over the next hour they went through the little notebook. He had used it to jot down names and times. If some hurt or upset her she gave no indication of it except for the occasional “oh” of surprise that escaped from her. Even baby Patrick’s death had not stopped his father from a speedy return to the welcoming arms and breasts of a stranger.

The other surprise was how many women frolicked with her husband the minute his wife and children flew off in their helicopter. It was clear that this was going on so frequently that some of the men, distinguished, clever ones, whom she thought of as happily married family men, could not fail to know.

“From what we know he probably kept some of them in the loop by letting them join in,” said Guy.

When he saw her eyebrows rise, he said:

“What you have to realize is that guys like that, not famous, not rich, middle-aged, probably very clever but not skilled in seduction techniques, can’t get hold of a girl who looks like a model or a film star unless it’s a presidential edict. This is fantasyland for them.”

No wonder Jack had been so successful at keeping all of this a secret, she thought.

Guy was watching her carefully. He knew that the information he was giving her could easily allow her to slide back into the same sort of depression he had seen when he had visited her at the disastrous new house in Washington.

“Look, let’s call it a day. If you like I’ll bring you the rest tomorrow.”

He moved over to her side of the table and sat next to her.

His training at briefing and debriefing foreign agents could come in useful now.

“If this is depressing you, maybe we should stop right now.”

“I couldn’t be more depressed than when I saw that picture of Marilyn. Frankly, now all the stuff about the rest of the women has come out I don’t feel so bad. It seems he wasn’t loyal to her either; the numbers, the frequency, it makes him look worse. He seems to be what the ancients in literature used to call a satyr, I believe. It looks as if he were completely out of control, driven to excess, and it contrasts so badly with his image.” She leapt up and went to the desk in the corner of the room and produced a magazine from the bottom drawer.

“But look at this. Because his sexual antics were so at odds with the way our life appeared, there’s some truly horrible stuff—I wouldn’t dignify it by calling them stories—starting to appear about me now.”

“Just ignore them, they think this stuff sells.”

“No, there’s more!” She started to pace back and forth in front of the shimmering fire.

“There’s this other theory that I was power-hungry, that I wanted to be First Lady so much that I was in on it all, that I deliberately
colluded to pretend that we were a happy family, that my European background and attitude to life mean that I thought infidelity was unimportant, the sophisticated way to behave. Or there’s the other theory, that I’m really stupid.”

He sensed that she was on a roll, one of anger and anguish. He decided to stop it.

“C’mon. That’s all garbage,” he interrupted loudly.

“But they are taking away my past. My life.
Our
life.

“I used to deal with the stories by thinking that life,
real
life, was taking place somewhere up here”—she indicated her shoulders—“and had no relationship with what they wrote down there. But now that my life with him is over…they are taking it, even the good bits, away.”

He stood up and went over to her.

“You must forget this. We need you, the public, the country needs you. Don’t let these bums get to you, everyone knows that this is all ridiculous. Give it time. People will begin to understand that he was not what he seemed, that he was prepared to risk everything for a lay, and I don’t mean just losing you, I mean everything. Just think of what the Russians could have done with some of this if they had known about his screwing around during the Cuban crisis. Arghh, it doesn’t bear thinking about.”

The open fire crackled, and they were both mesmerized for an instant, thinking back to those dangerous days.

“Now, more than ever, you have emerged as the star of this show, the Kennedy show, in fact the whole presidency itself. I know you won’t like this but if I was an advisor to you—”

She cut in, “But you are. Apart from my mother there’s no one else I really trust.”

“Okay, if I was properly advising you on how to run your life and how to protect the image of the ‘numero uno widow’ in the world, I would say that so far you haven’t done a thing wrong.

“Everything about you has been perfect. From the way you planned the funeral to everything you have done since.”

Slowly Jackie started to shake her head.

“No, now that it has all come out it’s obvious I wasn’t enough for Jack.”

“So, more fool him!” He stopped looking straight into her eyes and wheeled around to sit back in his seat.

“Remember, soon the historians will start to look at how smart he was at the rest of it. They will be measuring his accomplishments. Whatever they think of his achievements in the future they will have to acknowledge that sex was his weakness, that he was unable to recognize the jewel that he had and that he wasted a lot of his time and energy pandering to his sex habit.”

Had he gone too far? Guy was relieved when she stopped pacing and sat down next to him.

“Life moves on,” he continued. “Even his greatest admirers will have to admit that in this day and age he just didn’t have the correct attitude toward women anyway. In his mind they were never his equal. He used them as nurses or whores; either way they were there just to satisfy his overactive ego. He’s gone, so now his presidency will have to face the jury of world opinion. But for you, this is no time to retreat or to dump your husband.”