by Paul Wolfe
I think that everyone I love will be taken from me. It is not logical, it is not rational, yet that is the thought that arises from deep within me, that is the summation of my life. I lose Rosamond and then I lose Michael and then I lose Jack and everything feels so ephemeral, thinner than air, and there is no place to stand.
I will keep painting because paintings make no sense and there is no way to make sense of this life, and I am not special. Everyone in the country cries and everyone is in shock, except for those who did this thing, and I am just one more person crying. I am just one more person crying. I could keep writing that. I will never forget my painting Half-Light, a wheel of four colors on a field of black, unfinished on the canvas in front of me when Anne called. It felt funny, the phone ringing, so I picked it up right in the middle of my work when I don’t pick up phones, and I knew everything, everything was there in the way Anne said “Mary.” He’s gone. And life happens just like that, life happens at the speed of death, and an empty space is borne by those still carrying on, there are missing persons and we have the punishment to be present. Yes, I read it in French, it was a French poet who wrote: “The true tomb of the dead is the heart of the living.”
NOVEMBER 28
Days of emptiness. Dallas never leaves me now. First a son, and now him. With a cataclysm, the cause of peace was lost and my lover erased. Am I to blame somehow, pushing him where they did not want him to go, pushing him where he himself didn’t want to go, or am I insane to assume even a modicum of blame? I, anonymous and inconsequential to a tragedy that will span generations and history to come.
Today was foggy and overcast, too much of a cliché to say that heaven was crying, and yet the earth was intensely sad. I decided to go to the towpath. Whenever I am lost, I walk by the canal, and in a wet gray world I walked the path, unable to see the waters of the Potomac for the mist. I simply walked, urged on by the force that makes people walk in the rain, battered by spray in my gray trench coat. Water scoured my eyes, now too wet to cry. And then I saw a figure approach. Perhaps I hallucinated it, two people lost in the storm at the same point and time—when I looked at the face, it was Jackie Kennedy. We had walked this towpath together before, and here we were again, naked to each other, and we hugged. We sobbed and hugged, a thousand miles away from any words that could be spoken, only a sorrow. Is it only a woman who can feel such sorrow, who is allowed to feel such sorrow, two women crying over a husband who is gone, as women have cried over men taken from them since the birth of time? We cried for all the wives and all the women who have been left when a man has gone, and it felt like I held her in the rain forever.
NOVEMBER 29
Kenny O’Donnell, emissary from a man no longer there, invited me to Hickory Hill. It is the first Thanksgiving without Jack, a mournful Thanksgiving. The family was gathered for the holiday, there being nothing else for them to do except gather, a massive Irish family sharing their special relationship with death by virtue of a Catholic faith. Death had crept up on me too—you never notice death until it’s there, driven as you are by the ceaseless rumble of dreams. And then one day your son is gone, and your marriage is gone, which is a form of death, and Jack is gone, and I say yes to Kenny; I will go to Hickory Hill. I am the character in a play I saw in New York City who said “I can’t go on, I will go on.” I say yes to Kenny and he tells me the family wants everyone to be together, but I can feel, unstated, that he does not want me excluded. The strange exile of mistresses. The death of the man you love, and you have no place in the proceedings; his proper family and official wife enact the rituals of mourning and you are left, breathing alone, in a vast chasm in which nothing is present but yourself.
We entered the living room, and Jackie was sitting next to Ethel, holding hands. I felt spectral, as if it was I who had died, that my soul was watching a film the way the dead apparently do, the way Roxanne Arcturis wrote of the Akashic records. I had the bizarre thought that each death transports you to the Hall of Records, and they are all here, Daddy Amos and ghost sister Rosamond and dear little Michael, chasing his big brother across the highway so as not to be late for dinner, but all I see is Kennedys.
I nodded quietly, and others nodded quietly to me, and I sat down beside Jack’s sister Eunice. Kenny went and spoke to Ted, who seemed very young and very confused. Then Bobby came over, and I bolted up to hug him. He seemed like some young priest, so different from his brother, who had always exuded a sense of nobility and royalty. A very spartan and righteous young man, whose basic sadness had been transmuted into a posture of unyielding toughness. An avenging angel staring straight in my eyes. “Thank you for coming, Mary,” he said, and I knew he continued to be generous, even in grief. He was acknowledging what I was to Jack—it was obvious he knew, I never knew he knew, and now no words came from me. I was deep in myself and hadn’t even taken off my sunglasses. Then he said, and he seemed so vulnerable saying it: “I thought they would get me instead of the president.” I just nodded and hugged him and he moved on. I don’t know why he told me that, but I have never been so aware of the danger we were all in, the wineglasses and leafy boughs of Georgetown no more than a dream inside a horror of death and evil, monsters and serpents just waiting for us somewhere beyond M Street.
A Negro serving maid in black dress and frilly white apron asked me if I wanted a plate with turkey and stuffing, and I just shook my head, looking into the sad world of her brown eyes. “When they brought him home,” she said slowly, “Mrs. Kennedy was still wearing that suit with the blood all over it. She wouldn’t take that thing off her body. She just kept wearing it, and I said let me take that thing off you, but she just said ‘No. Let them see what they’ve done.’”
DECEMBER 5
Post-Dallas winter days are gray enclosures surrounding pieces of the world, a visual representation of the emptiness at the root of all things. I think of loss, of what might have been after he left office, when perhaps we would finally have been together, when his brutal catalog of ailments might finally begin healing. But it is impossible. There is no way to picture him other than as he was, smiling at a nation and walking briskly down paths toward helicopters, or lying in my arms eager and throbbing in unofficial hours of passion. Could he have been a professor? A writer? A free-floating intellectual free from his father’s command? A shining ambassador for peace through the kingdoms of the world?
I went to the towpath again yesterday. I looked through gray fog out to the undulating Potomac and thought Jack had become like a poem now, though he was not a poetic man. He was actually quite shy, and in his desperation never to be alone, in his mad obsession with fucking, he was, I have come to realize, a somewhat sad character. I came to love him later than he came to love me. Sometimes love catches up. And sometimes too late.
DECEMBER 12
I am hollow. The organism with which I meet the atmosphere has receded, maybe I hover two inches from myself. How many people have to leave you before you refuse to stand there and be left again? I hold my brush in my hand and allow the paint to speak.
I am left with pure optical truth. I retain that as a gift from Kenneth. In a life when meaning is too brutal, I embrace a form of painting with the meaning removed. Painting with no claim to represent some separate reality existing outside the frame. The frame is the crossroads, the place where the painting meets everything in the universe that is not the painting.
Because I am hollow, because I have learned my lessons from Kenneth Noland well, I am removing all gesture and all texture and all emotion from my work, letting color and not the design carry the painting.
My arm moves and shapes just float on the canvas as we human beings just float in the world, shapes without meaning. And what we don’t know is that we have no meaning.
1964
JANUARY 11
Quentin and Mark are home for winter break, this winter when the losses accumulate like the wisps of snow that dust the yards of Georgetown. They are just wisps. We are too far south fo
r the white winters of my childhood, and the calendar’s turning to 1964 brings no renewal. But at least my sons are back, happy and fidgety, back in the little house with their long-lost mom.
I cooked up spaghetti and meatballs. It brings them back to their childhood, the days when Michael was still with us and we were all still a family. As I watch them devour the spaghetti, I cannot help but think of the strange fate of mothers and sons. I was there when they were born and there when they were young, but I won’t be there when they are old. They will grow old without me; I will become a distant memory of diminishing significance, a photograph in a frame in some room that they will not particularly take notice of after a while, except when they pack it up to move to a new house. Your children replace you, and then they themselves become the next generation of the forgotten.
So now Michael is not with us, the Tragedy without end; Cord is gone, buried in secrets; and my sons spend their days in boarding schools far up north in the woods of Massachusetts. Their childhood is a lost memory.
I do not like to write about my sons, and will not do so again. They belong to a private realm beyond the conversation recorded in these pages.
But yesterday, Quentin brought home a pile of papers from Cord’s house for me to sign. School reports, health records, the paperwork parents get used to signing as part of the job of being parents. I have never been comfortable with paperwork. Cord is much more thorough. He relishes controlling events through indications written on paper. He is accustomed to the weight and significance of documents, while I am more comfortable with canvas and color. Nevertheless, dreading the tedium, I went through the papers this morning at the kitchen table. Buried in the pile, I found a document that did not seem to pertain to Quentin and Mark. Nor did it seem to emanate from a school office.
The document was a diagram, an organizational chart written in what seemed like strange code. I asked Quentin if there was supposed to be a diagram or chart among the papers Cord wanted me to sign, and he said he had no idea. His father had told him to take the papers on his desk to his mother. Quentin had gone into Cord’s home office and taken all the papers on the desk and piled them into his briefcase. He took every paper he could find because he could not bear his father scolding him for leaving anything behind. I looked at the document and suddenly knew I would never show it to Quentin.
JANUARY 17
Jack always loved Kenny O’Donnell, and so did I. Kenny was the beating heart of the Irish mafia surrounding Jack—best friend, confidant, chief political guru. Ted Sorensen once said if Jack Kennedy ever ordered Kenny O’Donnell to jump off the Empire State Building, Kenny would ask for a towel to be put down so he wouldn’t mess up the sidewalk.
Kenny is a tortured man now. He blames himself for the assassination. It was he who organized the trip to Dallas. He phoned me up to say he was ready to talk if I was, and I was so happy to hear from him. Kenny was always affectionate and respectful. I think he knew that had Jack served out his two terms, he might have divorced Jackie and married me.
I told him we should meet somewhere private, someplace no one would see us. I’ve begun to live as a spy. Clandestine has become second nature to me, as if prowling through the chambers of a secret life was bequeathed to me by my ex-husband, along with child support. But I am also a contradiction: a covert operator with an overt mouth. A woman without restraint, which is inconvenient to the cold men. They don’t like women without restraint. So I don’t know what they have in mind for me. I don’t know if they have anything in mind for me. I don’t even know who they are. Is an invisible threat more insidious than a visible one? Or am I the threat? My family has troubled the status quo of things for generations, and now I have come to know things, secrets, more than I ever wanted to know. There is also a part of me numb to the onrush of events, a part that simply doesn’t care anymore. Too many people have died and left me now. I notice myself walking over the carcass of their memories.
Kenny told me to meet him at Don Luigi’s in McLean at five.
JANUARY 19
Kenny was seated when I arrived, had already begun the daily regimen of gin martinis. Three more would disappear inside him before the evening was out. We hugged, he lingered that extra millisecond, he was hugging the memories of the past. A hug can offer a split-second illusion that the past can be held on to if you but squeeze hard enough, even though it has already disappeared into the vacuum of time. His skin was as I remembered, pasty and freckled, so dry, as if no moisture ever entered him though he drank incessantly. The dark circles and sad pouches were new.
He told me he was working for LBJ and planning an exit strategy. He was considering a run for governor of Massachusetts. You’d make a good one, I told him, though I knew Kenny was never a man for the spotlight. He is a backstage man. We are some of us born to shine, and some of us born to polish those who shine.
I myself am a private person. I know in fact that I am peculiarly private. I do not allow myself to be photographed, for instance. There are no pictures of me. I will not let a false image of myself be frozen permanently onto paper. Yet my life has continually been cast with public figures. My parents were public figures, I grew up surrounded by public figures, virtually everyone I know today is a public figure. Only I am not.
Kenny shook his head, and tears flooded his eyes. “It’s a nightmare,” he said.
Poor bloodshot Irish eyes. “We lost our best friend,” I told Kenny, and burning memory condensed to tears in my eyes.
Kenny and Dave Powers were in the motorcade behind Jack. Jack had wanted them to ride behind him, wanted them to sense the crowd, wanted to know if the people loved him. Jack always wanted to know things; he exhausted people with questions, he especially needed to know how much he was loved. Maybe that’s what made him a deft politician.
Kenny said that when the cars turned onto Elm Street, it was like riding into an ambush. He heard four or five shots. Two of them came from the front, from somewhere near the fence on the grassy knoll. He later reported that to the FBI, but the FBI was under orders not to hear it. The FBI agents said it couldn’t have happened that way. “I told them I flew B-17 bombardiers. I flew thirty missions against Nazi Germany. I was shot down and escaped from enemy prison. I know what a bullet sounds like, and I can tell what direction it’s coming from. They said I must be imagining things, please rethink it and tell us where the bullets came from. The whole thing was an excruciating exercise. They didn’t want to know the truth. And I didn’t want to stir up any more pain or trouble for the family, so I testified the way the FBI wanted me to. I’m on record saying all the shots came from behind, from the Book Depository. But it’s a fucking lie.”
I told Kenny I’ve been working my way through the newspaper reports, official announcements, marking things up, ripping out pages, scribbling comments, underlining lies, but finally I stopped. It was just too hard, and I had lost the point. I told him that when the ground is composed of lies, it’s like gravity has been suspended, and I’m tempted to just continue painting and stop thinking. Plus, I keep getting warnings.
“I don’t think they will bother you,” he said. “But how do I know? I know what they’re capable of, and their faces are well hidden.”
“Cord used to tell me I was being protected. I took it for granted. Now I’m no longer being protected.”
“Mary, Oswald tested negative for firing a rifle.”
He spoke it simply and then let it hang in the air, as if it were the summary of his testimony. As if it were the signature fact his life would then turn on. We remained quiet as the waiter laid two dishes of pasta on the table. Kenny said no more. Our best friend was gone, and there was no more to say. He was crying. What becomes of a woman who doesn’t shut up? I wondered. Kenny is busy crying. Cord and James Jesus are off somewhere smoking and smirking. Bobby is in a pit of despair, waiting for his moment to strike, or not sure that moment will ever come. That leaves me. Can a blonde go up against the whole world?
JANUA
RY 22
I am looking at the document that mysteriously appeared amid the school papers. At the top of the page is a title:
JM/RESET.
I have no idea what this means, or what language it refers to. At the top of the organization chart is a box that says:
M.
A line extends from this box to the right that says:
HELM.
Another line leads down from M. that says:
HARV.
From HARV, three lines descend downward to three separate sections:
AGENCY. MOB. CUBANS.
Under AGENCY, three lines extend to three boxes that say:
EHH. DATPHIL. DFITZ.
Under MOB, three lines extend to three separate boxes:
STRAF. CMAR. JROS.
Under CUBANS, three lines extend to three separate boxes:
DMORAL. MANART. RCUB.
Under AGENCY, another line extends to a separate box:
PONTCHARTRAIN
Under PONTCHARTRAIN, two lines extend to two separate boxes:
FERR. GUYB.
Under CUBANS, a line extends to a separate box:
CORSICA LSART.
Was it a mistake, or did someone want me to find this page?
JANUARY 25
What if you came upon a code? That’s what I asked the code man himself, Frank Wisner, the CIA’s father of black ops. We were sitting in his garden as he sipped an old-fashioned. I could see the load of woe he bore behind his eyes, eyes trained to reveal nothing, trained by the forces of our nation for cipherhood.