Everything else, however, is sproiled.
The reporter’s words settle in focus. “Mrs. Onassis’s longtime spokesperson and longtime friend Nancy Tuckerman confirmed that she died at ten-fifteen this evening, about an hour and twenty minutes ago in her Fifth Avenue apartment, just across the street from Central Park, where she was photographed only Sunday with her longtime companion Maurice Tempelsman.”
Longtime, longtime, longtime. I mentally mark up the reporter’s speech the way Jackie took to a manuscript. LAZY! FIND BETTER LANGUAGE! REDUNDANT! An hour and twenty minutes ago. I was walking up the steps, coming home from the library. The library where I was surrounded by books.
She loved books.
“Tempelsman was at her bedside along with thirty-six-year-old Caroline, the mother of her three grandchildren, and her son, John. Other people were there, including her former brother-in-law Senator Ted Kennedy and the actress Daryl Hannah, a friend of her son’s. She had lapsed in and out of a coma today, and was in fact in a coma when she passed away this evening. Her sister-in-law Ethel Kennedy, the widow of Robert Kennedy, also a close friend, said the apartment was filled with love. Again, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis passed away earlier this evening at the age of sixty-four.”
Daryl Hannah from Splash?
“There was a mermaid there?” I don’t mean it as a joke—it’s the only takeaway my brain can register—but Daniel snickers anyway, wiping away a tear. He squeezes my hand and it feels good, like maybe I’m no longer in danger of falling.
The reporter throws it back to Ted Koppel, who brings in a medical expert to talk about non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The expert says that fifty percent of people diagnosed are still alive five years later, and that the way Jackie succumbed to the disease only a few months after diagnosis was unusually fast. I want to scream. A few months since announcement of the diagnosis. There’s no doubt Jackie tried to keep her health private for as long as possible before that. All of this feels like sloppy reporting, but in truth I don’t know anything different—I just don’t like what’s being reported. I don’t like any of it at all.
I’m not ready for this news. I didn’t call her back. Was she sick when we worked together? When she sat next to a fireplace in summer? Did I somehow know this? Is that why I dreamt of her shoes? Now she is gone and I’m panicked I never said thank you. Did I say thank you? Perhaps I did. But I never said good-bye.
There was a mermaid there.
The broadcast cuts to black-and-white photos of Jackie on Air Force One, standing by LBJ as he is sworn in. Then her climbing the steps to the Capitol Rotunda. Her kissing the coffin. John-John saluting his father. She looks little more than a girl herself, so poised, statuesque, yet she is probably my age in these moments. And I am but a child, still.
“Remember the ladies,” I say, recalling one of the many gifts she gave me. That women of her generation had obligations, duties. But they were girls once, with dreams and hopes of their own. And then I remember what she said next: especially your mother.
I can’t help but wallow in the fragility of life. What if my mother were taken now? What if there was still so much left unspoken? In the hotel room the night after the book party she held my hand and told me she had fun. That she was proud of me, even—just as Jackie said she would. But did I tell her anything? Seize that opening? Did I apologize for my own behavior? Did I truly forgive her for hers? What kind of son am I?
“The ordinariness of it all is oddly comforting,” Daniel says, interrupting my thoughts. Ordinariness doesn’t seem like a word. If we were playing Scrabble I might challenge him on it based on its number of syllables—it’s much too much a mouthful for its meaning. But if I’m going to throw around words like sproil, I don’t know that I have the moral high ground.
“How do you mean?” But I already know exactly what he means. There was no Dallas. There was no Ambassador Hotel. There was no gunshot. There was no actual Walter Cronkite trying to hold back tears on TV. There was only Daniel waking me from my own slumber.
“She was human.”
“Turn it off,” I tell him. Daniel looks at me. I can feel my eyes sting, and I resist the urge to cry because I don’t know what else to do but to fight. I’m not going to be able to hold back tears for long and I don’t want to see pictures of Jackie as everyone knew her. I don’t want to see the woman who belonged to everyone. “Please.”
I want only to remember my friend. I want only the version of her who belonged to me. A woman with her hands in her hair, legs tucked beside her, asking me always to try.
For James, a son who would make any mother proud.
Daniel gets up, and I sink farther into the couch, as if he’d dismounted the opposite end of a seesaw. He snaps off the television set and the room is deafeningly silent.
◆ THIRTY-FIVE ◆
On Tuesday Daniel and I both dress in black suits, he exceedingly handsome in his, mine feeling alarmingly small—like I grew four inches overnight. He assures me I look fine, then reassures me when I threaten to change, and when he finally gets me out of the apartment we walk over to Eighth Avenue to hail a cab. I fidget with my father’s cuff links as we wait. My mother gave them to me years ago, after he left, because she remembered I had admired them as a child; I debated not wearing them, but they remind me of the journey I’ve been on. Without Jackie, it seems like I’m going to be in charge of reminding myself to never stop trying. We ride in silence to St. Ignatius Loyola Roman Catholic Church, although Daniel turns once and offers a feeble smile and in that one expression a whole conversation is had. We’ve been good at this of late: talking less, communicating more. Traffic slows and then grinds to a halt; there is very little honking, as if the whole city is paying respect. We get out of the cab at Eightieth and Park and walk the final four blocks—it’s impossible to get any closer by car.
The church is a hundred years old maybe, a neoclassic structure built of what I’m guessing is limestone. It looks not unlike a government building, more courthouse, perhaps, than church, or maybe a building for customs. It’s not showy like Manhattan’s neo-gothic cathedrals like St. Patrick’s or St. John the Divine. For Jackie, it seems just right. The announcement in the Times said that she was baptized here; when I read that I got very emotional—this solemn occasion a homecoming, of sorts. The night after she died I made Daniel go with me for daiquiris (although we could find only the sweet kind that sorority girls drink on spring break) and we toasted a remarkable woman who lived many lifetimes, and yet still died impossibly young. The drinks proved excellent lunch ladies again; the more we consumed, the more we were able to laugh and reminisce and rejoice. (Until we were drunk, and then we were sad again.)
As we make our way up Park Avenue, the crowd becomes thick and suddenly we are in a throng of spectators and police have the street cordoned off. I grab Daniel’s arm to keep him from plowing too far ahead.
“I don’t . . .” I start, but I’m not sure what it is I’m hesitant to say.
“You don’t what?”
“I don’t want to push.” But what is it I do want? “Can we just stand here and watch?”
Daniel reaches for my hand and quietly squeezes. There is some police activity, talking on walkie-talkies and waving and making signals. I look east where two officers are pointing.
“She lived just two blocks over.”
Daniel points in the direction of Fifth Avenue.
“And a few blocks up.”
We maneuver a bit closer without being aggressive; the crowds are held back by metal barriers. I motion for Daniel to follow me up Park in the wake of two photographers who are not as concerned with being respectful, but stop short of the bank of television cameras set up across the street from the church. We are two of the only people wearing suits; the rest of the crowd is dressed more comfortably for the eighty degrees predicted.
After we stand there a good, long whil
e, a hearse appears on Eighty-Fourth Street and rounds the corner onto Park. A hush falls over the crowd. A number of black sedans follow until the hearse glides to a gentle stop. Family members step out of the cars and I’m relieved to be in the company of others dressed in black; it makes me feel less out of place. I forget for a moment and look for Jackie’s face among the mourners, her familiar sunglasses, her ramrod posture, her perfect lampshade of hair.
Of course she’s not among them.
The pallbearers assemble. They are nephews mostly, there’s a family resemblance, although one man is older and clearly has white hair. They huddle together, going over their instructions one last time before pulling the casket out of the back of the hearse and then, in unison, hoisting it onto their shoulders; the flowers draped over the coffin flounce gently. John and Caroline appear and follow their mother up the steps. I move to wave my arm, like they might know me, just as I feel that I have come to know them.
“Do you want to try to get in?” Daniel asks.
“No,” I tell him. And after another moment, “I can’t.”
I expect Daniel to protest, but he doesn’t.
I spot a black woman with graying hair a few people over and nod toward her. She’s dressed in her finest too, as if for church, and is holding a transistor radio and fidgeting with the antennae.
“Try to listen?” Daniel asks. I nod and we move subtly toward her, careful not to bear down.
She adjusts the radio until she picks up a weak signal and we hear Bryant Gumbel speaking and then, a moment later, Katie Couric chime in—she’s picked up an NBC broadcast before losing it again. The woman looks up at us and shakes her head. “I just put new batteries in this thing.”
“May I help?” I ask, and she hands me the radio. I fidget with the dial until Bryant and Katie return. I hand the radio back.
She studies our suits as if she’s found compatriots in a foreign land. “Did you know her?”
“Pardon?” I say, buying time to formulate an answer.
“Did you know Mrs. Kennedy?” she asks again, pointing to our suits.
I can feel Daniel staring at me, curious to see how I’ll respond. I look down at our clothes and offer what is now so apparently true. “Mrs. Onassis?” On more than a few occasions I have exaggerated our acquaintance, a ridiculous attempt at posturing. But today I only have the truth. “I knew her only a little.”
The woman is satisfied with that response. People aren’t here to pry or to gawk, everyone is so well behaved and you can tell they genuinely want to feel part of something that now feels forever gone. There’s no pushing, there’s no yelling—in fact there’s an almost unsettling quiet throughout crowd.
“Here,” the woman says, handing me her radio. “You boys hold it for me and we can all listen in.”
I hesitate to take the radio, and when I do I hold it with both hands like I’m the gentle custodian of someone’s most prized possession. Together we listen to Bryant and Katie and a third voice I don’t recognize, they mention the notable guests, the current First Lady, Hillary Clinton, and a former in Lady Bird Johnson, Senators Edward Kennedy, John Kerry, and John Glenn, her sister Lee Radziwill, the director Mike Nichols, and Jackie’s children. They reference the crowd, and it’s weird to think they are talking about us. That we are indeed part of this—something bigger than ourselves. Katie speaks of the opera singer Jessye Norman, here in attendance, and Bryant mentions something about Franz Schubert before they cut away to listen.
There are no cameras inside, at least that I’m aware of, only microphones to broadcast the service. Outside many people stare at the church façade with no real way to listen, and there are others, like us, huddled around battery-operated radios sharing information as best we can. The faint whisper of “Ave Maria” drifts through the air, muffled by the church walls, amplified only slightly by the scattered radios. But the crowd, previously swaying and fidgeting uncomfortably in the midmorning heat, stands still in awe, as if one of the world’s great voices was on the steps of St. Ignatius singing only for them, only for us. The woman next to me links her arm with mine in fellowship as we listen to this hymn.
When Ted Kennedy gives the eulogy, the crowd remains equally still, even though only those of us with radios can hear him speak. “She made a rare and noble contribution to the American spirit,” he says. “I often think of what she said about Jack in December after he died: ‘They made him a legend, when he would have preferred to be a man.’ Jackie would have preferred to be just herself, but the world insisted that she be a legend too. She never wanted public notice—in part, I think, because it brought back painful memories of an unbearable sorrow, endured in the glare of a million lights.”
I look up the avenue and down; there are several thousand people spanning multiple city blocks. If we were just a few of those million lights, the bright, prying whites of our eyes ever focused on her every move, we are dimmed today in her honor.
We listen to every word, Daniel, this woman, and I. And there are many. Mike Nichols offers a scriptural passage. John reads from Isaiah, and Caroline reads “Memory of Cape Cod” by Edna St. Vincent Millay. When they take the microphone I can feel others around us lean in, but I don’t mind. In the end, six simple words offered by the officiating priest stand out above all the others: So dearly beloved, so sorely missed.
I hold it together and keep my composure the entire time, stoic like Jackie always was, until Maurice Tempelsman, her Belgian, addresses the mourners. He reads from “Ithaka” by Constantine Cavafy.
“Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey; without her you would not have set out. She has nothing left to give you now.”
My shoulders slump and I start to weep, Daniel rubs my back and the woman with the radio looks up at me with a kind smile. She doesn’t say anything, but rubs my back too, and I nod and then wipe my eyes and whisper, “I may have known her more than I thought.”
After the service, we watch as the doors open, and the first mourners exit somberly onto the street. Limos line up in front of the church and I study faces that I imagine belong to members of the Kennedy and the Radziwill and the Bouvier families. Daniel squeezes my hand with excitement when we catch a glimpse of Mike Nichols; a director himself, that’s a sighting that’s extra-meaningful to him. He’s been so good to me these last days and weeks, I’m happy there’s a small piece of this grandeur that feels like his. Eventually the coffin is brought out and as it’s carried down the stairs I can clearly see the flower arrangements adorning it are in the shape of a cross. People twitter with insight, things they’ve read, things they’ve heard; the hearse is headed to the airport, President Clinton himself will meet the casket at Washington National, she will be buried in Arlington National Cemetery next to her husband—her first husband—one final act to discharge her obligations to history.
As the hearse pulls away and the crowds start to thin, Daniel asks if I’d like to go somewhere, perhaps to get something to eat. I ask if we can stay a little longer. We say good-bye to the woman with the radio and she hugs us both and tells us to be “good boys.” When she embraces me, she whispers, “I admired her husband. How lucky you are to have known her in any way at all.”
We stay until even the cameramen lining the sidewalk start to pack it in. Eventually Daniel puts his arm around me; I nod and we turn to head down Park Avenue toward home.
“Could we walk in the park instead?” I ask.
“Of course,” Daniel says, and we cut over on Seventy-Ninth Street.
We find shade under the trees and relief from the heat and we both loosen our ties and remove our jackets. I remove my father’s cuff links and put them in my pocket before rolling up my shirtsleeves.
“It was really lovely,” Daniel says.
“It was.”
As we walk in Central Park, Daniel starts talking about things he saw in the crowd, people he made out, details that m
oved him. I do my best to listen, but there’s a woman ahead in a yellow cap—I can just make out the top of her head as she weaves through a sea of people. I remember Jackie in her bathing cap on a similarly warm day, bobbing in the waters of Squibnocket Pond like an angel gliding through the heavens. Daniel’s voice fades and I stop to recall something Ted Kennedy had said:
She graced history. And for those of us who knew and loved her—she graced our lives.
◆ THIRTY-SIX ◆
When I wake and whisper to Daniel that I need to go away for a few days, he nods, tousles my bed head, and smiles; I worry this may trigger memories of the last time I ducked town, but he seems to know where I’m going and why. The morning light streams through our narrow window that opens to the top of the air shaft. From my side of the bed I can just make out the faintest sliver of blue sky. When I think of the to-do list that comes with this decision and compare it with my day if I were to tackle some writing (maybe stepping out only for a pizza, or pint of ice cream to bring home), it’s tempting not to get out of bed at all.
“I’ll miss you,” Daniel says.
“I’ll miss you too.” And when I feel I don’t have Daniel’s full attention, I grab his chin and turn his head so that he’s looking at me.
He smiles while scratching his bare chest before enveloping me in a big hug. “I know you will.”
I’m able to rent a car at the second Enterprise location I find (the first only has luxury sedans available, which I know will be a point of contention) and I make it through the Lincoln Tunnel with little effort; the traffic gods are with me. Maybe they know I have a hard day ahead, or maybe they think I’ve been through enough. As I drive north through New Jersey I flip through radio stations to find something, anything, to keep me distracted, calm. The Carpenters are on a seventies station and I somehow take that as a good omen. Even though the song is “Rainy Days and Mondays,” I sing a full verse of “Ticket to Ride” before realizing my mistake.
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