by Adam Braver
The bedroom is much cooler than the rest of the plane. A streak of blood stains the comforter. There is one dimpled spot on the bed, where Jackie had been sitting before she left for the swearing-in. She sits there again. The mattress barely gives.
Lady Bird again offers to help find a change of clothes. She busily opens the closet door, intruding in a way that she would never do otherwise. “Let’s see,” she says. The wire hangers ting against each other. Lady Bird doesn’t yet know that she’s first lady. It hasn’t overtaken her the way the presidency has with her husband. She stands with her back to Jackie. Shoulders twitching, breathing rapidly. She too must be suffering, but trying not to show it, believing she has no right to.
“We always enjoyed the two of you,” Jackie says. “Always enjoyed your company.”
Lady Bird is breathing harder. Her wool coat rises and falls. “Now, maybe this one,” she says, still looking in the closet. “I’d think this one would be most comfortable.” She turns around halfway. Jackie only sees her in profile. And although Lady Bird is talking, it’s strange that Jackie doesn’t see her mouth moving. Lady Bird is saying that she’ll wait right here if Jackie wants to step into the washroom to get cleaned up. She starts to pull a dress off the rack. A simple dark one Jackie had planned to wear to Governor Connally’s evening reception. “Then I’ll help you get into this,” Lady Bird says. “You’ll be much more comfortable, dear. Much more.”
But Jackie shakes her head. She draws a tight smile, enough to ward off tears. Her chin trembles. And she feels a tingle at the base of her neck. Looking up at Lady Bird, Jackie’s head continues to shake. She’s pushing away at the dress. “No,” she says, and Lady Bird says, “What?” and Jackie says, “I want the world to see what they’ve done to Jack.” And though she’d intended to say it in a way that was appreciative and explanatory, when she hears her own words, floating through the bedroom as though they are somebody else’s, she realizes the bitterness and ferocity behind them.
Near Death.
Maybe that’s when she thought she was dying.
On the back trunk of the limousine. Accelerating out of parade speed. Screaming. Calling out for Clint Hill. He was screaming back. Climbing on the bumper. Reaching for her hands. Her cries were real. A throaty, primal version of her voice. But the cries were coming from someplace else. A broken version of herself, smashed wires and splintered parts.
Maybe that’s when she thought her soul was ascending.
On top of the car. Without heartbeats and pulses. For a moment she seemed so light. All vapor. Where a bullet could pass freely. There were no people. No crowds. No city streets or battlegrounds. Everything seemed oddly perfect.
Maybe she had died for just a moment.
When she and Clint took cover in the car, it was as though she’d fallen back into her body. A strange crash in which nothing seemed to fit right. Shrunken and stretched. And the blood is soaking her, and Jack’s pushed down into the seat, his face smashed against the interior, and it stinks and it’s raw, and she can hear Clint’s heart pounding against her back, and Connally moaning, and she just can’t fit back into her body, nor does she want to, because although she keeps talking to Jack, whispering to him that he’ll be okay, she knows Jack is dead, and she doesn’t want to be in this world anymore. She can’t even scream. Her body is refusing her mind. It’s all contortions. Closing her eyes, she believes she’s crawling out of her body again into a strange world; but when the limousine finally pulls up to the ambulance bay and Clint jumps out, she finds her arms wrapped around Jack, and she knows they’re her arms, and she knows just where she is, and what the inside of a human body smells like.
Shock.
At the hospital, the doctor told her it was shock. He was pushing up her sleeve while he topped off the needle, saying shock can do things to the body that you wouldn’t think were possible. The body works on its own in traumatic situations, he said, finding its own way to cope with the stress. She hadn’t said anything about the experience. She hadn’t said anything at all. But he kept talking about shock as though he knew. As nervous around her as all the rest. Trying to provide comfort through logic. The solace of science. He tapped the syringe and rubbed alcohol on her arm. It would take effect in a matter of minutes. Temper the shock. Maybe seconds, even.
All she really wanted was a cigarette. Where she could rise up and drift away with the smoke.
Walking Spanish: Part Two.
Lady Bird looks back once as she leaves the bedroom. Jackie nods, as if to tell her it’s fine. She takes in a deep breath. Looks around the room. Rubbing her hand along the comforter on Jack’s side.
Everything’s over in less than a minute. Less than twenty-four seconds to fire the bullets. Twenty-eight seconds to take the oath. Now she’s left sitting here while Jack lies at the other end of the airplane.
She rises. Goes to the door, pushing it open, peeking out to both sides of the main cabin. Without opening it the whole way, she slips through the doorway, almost ghostly. She just wants to be with Jack now. In private. She’s done her duty, tried to stand proud for her children and the memory of their father. Now she wants to sit with her husband.
She moves through the cabin, grabbing the seat backs for balance. Startles when she sees O’Donnell standing in front of her. He glances over her shoulder. She hears people.
“Jackie,” he whispers, as though it’s the third or fourth time he’s said it. “Is everything . . . ?”
“I’m just... ”
“Let me help you.”
“I just want to be with Jack.”
“The plane’s about to . . . Captain Swindal’s just announced. Let me help you. Please.”
“No. Alone.”
“Please let me.”
“I just want to be with Jack.”
O’Donnell pauses. Looks over his shoulder. “A chair, maybe?”
“A chair would be nice.”
“I’ll get you a chair. For the living room.”
“That would be nice. A chair would be nice.”
He walks in front of her, in a nervous rush. Behind her, people are watching. She feels it. An unnatural quiet. A fixed silence. And behind them, the new president will already be on the phone, making plans and arrangements, assuming his position. As soon as she’s safely out of sight, the people behind her will join the president. Huddling over him. Making sure his wife is content. But for now they’re waiting anxiously. Watching. Their impatient stares pushing her along toward Jack. Through the cabin hallway of Air Force One. Being pushed away. One hand on one seat back at a time. Walking Spanish.
WHAT PROFESSOR TACKACH REMEMBERS
True Story.
They were all just kids in a New Jersey parochial school. And, as he remembers it, Sister Bridget, the principal, who was always so staid and shy, burst into the room, her face gone in a hundred directions, saying, “President Kennedy has been shot in Dallas.”
The children were all moved into the chapel in the adjacent church and told to wait and pray. They sat in silence. Only the occasional cough or sniffle. Nervously unsure. But everybody, even the smallest ones, knew their prayers had gone unanswered when the priest came up to the altar dressed in black vestments, looked out over the room, eyes fixed above the crowd like a stage-fraught actor, and said, “Let us pray for the repose of the soul of President John F. Kennedy.”
True Coda.
Congressman Patrick Kennedy says there isn’t a day when someone doesn’t tell him the story of where she was when his uncle Jack was shot. How eager people are to recall their stories, as though after all these years they’re still trying to understand them. Still, he tells you, he understands the importance of mythology, and the way in which stories don’t just preserve the myths, but help connect them to the larger world. And how sometimes it’s the retelling of stories that brings purpose. How placing yourself within them makes something a little less senseless. Patrick Kennedy, who wouldn’t be born for another four years after
the bullets were fired, has become part of the story.
THE SCIENCE OF WARMTH
THE PHYSICS ARE SIMPLE. Through thermal conductivity, energy is transferred from atom to atom, moving heat to otherwise cold places, due to the difference in temperature between them. Fourier’s law of heat conduction tells us that the “time rate” of heat flow through the receiving object is proportional to the difference in temperature.
There is a formula for that law.
There is always someone with an answer. For everything.
It is about a five-hour trip by air from Dallas to Washington, and Jackie spends much of it in the rear of the plane, sitting beside the bronze casket that carries her husband’s body. Sometimes she places her hand on its top. Her fingers are long and slim, what people usually call piano hands. She rests her palm on top of the cold metal casing, testing to see if her body can warm the spot. But she is cold and chilled. The feeling that she has not slept for weeks is coupled by a fear that she probably won’t sleep a full night for the rest of her life. Drugs or no drugs. But the spot beneath her hand does warm.
She leans in closer. Maybe the heat is coming from someplace else. It can’t be from her.
Biting her lip, Jackie looks up. Scans the room. She wanted privacy, but they check on her anyway. When she is sure that nobody is behind her, Jackie closes her eyes.
Then, leaving her hand on the warm spot of the casket, she cranes her neck down to its side, near the handles, and she whispers, “Jack?”
She holds her breath, imagining. The discovery that this has all been some kind of medical oversight. A terrible misunderstanding that might be laughed about in years to come. At the thought of delivering such news, she can picture standing in the cabin, the stupefied look on Johnson’s face, and the delirious panic that would come from O’Donnell and all the other loyalists. How thrilling to be at a loss for those words.
Jackie lets her breath out again.
“Jack?” she whispers, feeling her full voice trying to break through. “Jack?” And she pulls closer to the casket, leaving her hand in place. Where there is warmth there is hope.
Jack’s foot had still felt warm when she kissed it. That had been in the emergency room at Parkland, and he had been covered by a sheet that was thick and bulky at the top, from where his head was still wrapped in layers of other sheets. Had he been given last rites? Jackie wanted to know. The priest told her conditional rites. There was finality to his voice when he said that. It trembled in his throat. That was when Jackie took off her ring. She turned to leave the room, feeling neither brave, nor proud, nor resigned. She ran her empty finger along the edge of the gurney. The metal, cold and detached, cut a straight line through the stillness of the room. Part of Jack’s right foot had been left uncovered. Sticking out. The tendons slightly tensed. His big toe at attention, with the wisp of blond hair curling up. Jackie braced her hands on the gurney. She leaned over. Only her lips touched his foot.
And although it is not rational, this is hope. Sitting in the back of the plane, still tasting the warmth of his foot and feeling the heat emanate off the double-walled bronze casket. Keeping perfectly still. Nothing in her body seems to be moving. Where her gut should be churning and her nerves ought to be leaping, there is nothing. But it is not like a deadening. It is more as though there were no biology inside her. Arms and legs screwed in place. Marbles for eyes. Dreams for thoughts.
She keeps thinking, Conditional rites. Conditional rites. Conditional rites. Nothing has been settled yet. Just declarations and signatures and bowed heads and wadded latex gloves and bloodied aprons half hanging in the laundry basket. But there has been no final absolution. No confirmation that God has given up on him. And so long as she feels him on her lips and her hand, she will not be fully resigned.
It is five hours back to Washington.
He was smiling at her less than two hours ago.
They must be over New Mexico. She pictures their route like a cartoon scene; a caricatured map of the United States, divided by the puzzle-shaped pieces, each with a different flower, maybe some livestock, and a star where the state capital is located. And her route is a black line traveling across those states, cutting through time. Part of her wishes the line would turn west. Maybe circle up around the Pacific Northwest, the Redwoods, Puget Sound. Maybe travel south down Highway 1 to Big Sur, Malibu, and San Diego. Then head east, over the Rockies, the Great Lakes, all the way over to the eastern bays—Narragansett, Chesapeake, Cape Cod. This country is too big for a direct route. And although she needs to hold her children, part of her wishes the plane would never land. This is their last time together alone. When that big black line stops at Andrews Air Force Base, she will have to hand Jack over to the country.
Kinetic energy refers to the energy that is produced through motion, the kind that propels a static body into action. Friction occurs when two moving objects come in contact with each other and convert the kinetic energy into sensitive energy, otherwise known as heat.
Fƒ = µ × Nis the approximation that Charles Augustin de Coulomb developed to explain friction. A simple and somewhat incomplete approximation, yet adequate enough to explain most encounters.
It seems there is always an explanation.
The metal beneath her touch begins to cool. Jackie’s instinct is to move her hand back and forth to warm it. But if she does that, then it is only physics at work. She presses her hand down harder. Not to make heat but to find it.
She feels a twinge of panic, which is meaningful only because it shows she can still feel. But then there are those terms like phantom limb and muscle memory, and again she is not sure what is and what is not real—only that she senses a slight cooling.
Leaning forward even more, she considers calling out for Jack again. But she catches herself. Now she is afraid of the answer.
O’Donnell’s presence is startling. In the back of the plane he stands to the side of her, his hands on his thighs, rubbing back and forth against his gray slacks. He stares into the casket wall. A faint outline reflected in the bronze finish. “I know you want to be alone,” he starts. And he pauses before the implied but.
She blocks him off from the casket. A partial eclipse. She straightens up slightly, still trying to keep an ear close to the seal. Her shoulder blades tense, could cut right through her jacket, sharp and exacting. She leaves her hand on the casket top. Rolls her lips inward, unwilling to give anything away.
“I’m maintaining,” she says. He probably can’t hear her. With her back to him, it must sound like she’s mumbling.
“I can sit back here with you . . . If you would like . . . Only, of course, if you’d like.”
She says, “Thank you, but I . . .”
“I’m sorry?”
“I think I prefer to just . . .”
“Sorry?”
Is O’Donnell forcing her to talk louder? She turns slightly, but not enough to move her hand from its place.
“Jackie.” He puts his hand on her arm. It is warm. “I know it’s crazy to be having this conversation, but we need to think about the funeral.” His voice wavers, landing with a strange strength on the word funeral.
“It is crazy.”
“Sorry?”
“I said it is crazy. To be having this conversation.” She just cannot talk above a whisper.
“It’s just that . . .”
“What?”
“That if there are any special plans or services that you would like me to relay to the . . .”
“I can’t have this conversation, Kenny.”
“We only have until the plane lands before protocol takes everything over.”
Jackie looks at him. “It is crazy to be having this conversation.”
It doesn’t appear that O’Donnell hears her. He just nods.
She asks, “What did the Lincolns do?” And the very fact that she asks that question without thinking of it as history astounds her. As if she is talking about the aging couple up the block tha
t she remembers from childhood.
“I’ll find out what is transpiring in Washington,” he says. “I’ll find out . . . Just wait here, and I’ll find out.”
She nods.
“Okay, then,” O’Donnell says. “I’ll report back shortly.”
When she hears the last of his footsteps, she leans forward. A child whispering under the covers so her parents won’t hear, she says, “Jack?” She waits a moment, and then again, a little louder, “Jack?” But she hears only the sound of heat leaving, as if it really is audible.
With O’Donnell gone she can’t shake the idea of being connected to the Lincoln family. Lincoln’s portrait hangs in the White House with the same dusty distance of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, for whom hotels, cities, sales, and elementary schools are named. That strange daguerreotype of Mary Todd Lincoln, cropped into an oval frame, where she poses, dignified, a slight Mona Lisa smile, her plump face turned barely to the right, with her cameo and huge earrings and roses in her hair, the physiognomy of the poor white farmer’s daughter with the inherent sophistication of the gentlemen noble class. It’s all been history books, no more present than Shakespeare or the great philosophers, ones that she has read over and over. But now Jackie understands the short thread of history. And somehow the stories become more prescient, and she understands how Mary Todd Lincoln folded under the pressure of the assassination, later to be declared officially insane by an Illinois court and, at the insistence of her own son, committed to a sanitarium. This woman of great intellect and poise, who orchestrated her husband’s rise and created his mythology within the moments of his life, could not hold on. Suddenly one hundred years is not a long time. Three or four generations at best. If you turn the soil, the bottom layer is still moist.