There was a branched path that led to a set of silver canoes. From there you could paddle across to a break in the high dunes, slip the boat up on the sand, and walk to the ocean. He’d taken me there the day before. But first I had to find my book. I’d left it somewhere after breakfast.
When I reached the back of the house, I saw the volleyball net and a lunch tray pushed aside on a lone patio table. Nearby, on a cushioned chaise, Mrs. Onassis sat barefoot—a pencil in her hand and a manuscript resting on her bent legs. I thought to leave, but she’d already looked up. She wore large-framed sunglasses that were nowhere near as grand as they appeared in photographs. The day before she had been polite—just shy of aloof—and I had been, too.
Rarely at a loss for words, I mumbled that John had gone waterskiing and I’d forgotten my book. Without getting up, she glanced, swanlike, to either side of the chaise, then shrugged. She seemed to me impenetrable. By then I’d found my battered copy of A Sport and a Pastime on a chair near the tray. I had it in my hand, but to leave I’d have to cross back in front of her. I could hear the stillness—that hot, dense three-o’clock kind—and I wanted to vanish, to be whisked off by some passing bird. But something kept me there. Then, softly and without smiling, she spoke, her eyes toward the water. “I was watching you earlier—you reminded me of me.” As I clicked off the many things this could mean, we began talking—how beautiful the day was, the manuscript she was working on, ballet, our childhoods in New York. I knew, as we spoke, that she was still watching.
In the course of our conversation there was a gesture to sit, which I did, at the very edge of her chaise. She set down the pages, bringing herself cross-legged, while I fingered a loose button on the upholstery. Soon the pauses between us lessened. The glasses came off. She slid them high on the colored scarf that covered her hair and shaded her wide-apart eyes with her hand.
Later that summer, when we knew each other better, she would ask me to tell her all about the play the summer before. She wished she had seen it. And when I said how good, how funny John had been, she smiled with pride, pressing the tips of her fingers to her lips.
But on this day, we began, somehow, to talk about children—about babies and early bonding. Because I had no experience, I had strong ideas about the subject, and although the psychology of breast-feeding seemed a rather iffy topic, I risked it. No longer observing, she hugged her knees tight and leaned in with a quality of attention and empathy I’d rarely experienced. Things are so different now, and women have more choices, she confided. She told me that when she had her children, the baby nurses just swooped in and spirited them away. They’d fasten them by their layettes to their cribs with large pins, and there was nothing you could do. Really, I said, amazed, wanting to take her hand in comfort.
As she spoke, the years fell from her face. Like an actress, she could reach into the past, and with a shift of thought, her features would change, mirroring the emotions of another time. Beside me, at the back of the house with the sun still high, she was no longer in her mid-fifties, the poised chatelaine of Red Gate Farm and mother of the man I loved, but a young woman of twenty-six, her brow raised in wonder at all that would happen.
There was a lull. We smiled, relieved somehow. I stood to go. I could have talked with her all afternoon, but I had my book, what I’d come for, and I didn’t want us to run out of things to say. I turned, but she spoke again, her eyes far away and remembering something. “Oh … about the volleyball—you don’t have to.”
As I walked across the grass, I felt changed. My step was lighter, and there was a tenuous catch at the back of my throat. Joy, maybe. I’d always assumed I would like his mother, but I hadn’t guessed that it would be this much.
Later, when John got back, we traded stories. We were dressing for dinner in the large rounded closet on the second floor of the Tower, his clothes on one side, mine on the other. In between “did I like his shirt” and “this dress or that” and “shall I wear my hair up or down,” I told him I’d canoed to the beach and that in the shallows of the pond near the old fishing shack, I’d seen two giant snapping turtles. “Oh, and I had a nice talk with your mother.” Half-listening before, he now appeared alarmed, the pastel linen shirt he’d chosen trailing from his hand. “What were you doing there?” he scolded. “You never, never go there between lunch and dinner.” He said it as though it was a canon I’d grown up with, adding that I should have known better. I felt my face grow hot. It was the first time he’d gotten angry with me; it didn’t sound like him. And I felt terrible for committing a faux pas, for disappointing him when things were going so well and mostly for intruding on what was clearly his mother’s private time.
When he left the closet, I wondered if there was more to it. If, in childhood, he’d been scolded often—before he’d committed to memory when to be around his mother and when to stay clear, before he’d learned to temper his boisterousness around her, before she’d built him the Tower. He’d told me that when he was younger, after his father died and before his mother remarried, she was a different person than she was now, and there were times that had been difficult for him, times when she would be away for too long. I could see that they adored each other, that they understood each other with an uncommon depth, but I knew from my relationship with my father that with such depth came complication. Perhaps, as I did, he just wanted the weekend to go smoothly. I saw clearly, if I hadn’t known already, that if things were to last between us, I would need her approval. Without it, they would end—not right away, but they would end.
I was learning the rules, the unspoken codes, the secrets and agreements that make up the edifice of every family. And I was learning something else: that his anger, quick and rare, jumped to bright heat and was over.
…
That night I wore a dress he’d given me. (To learn my size but still surprise me, he’d asked for shoe size, hat size, and glove size as well.) Fancier than required, it was strapless, of fine, heavy, black Italian cotton, and in the right light, there was a sheen to the fabric. I loved that dress. It was his first real gift—something I might not have chosen, but when I put it on and felt the bodice snug around me, ran my hands along the folds of the full, flirtatious, tiered skirt, I thought he knew me better than I knew myself. As we walked across to the main house, fog had come in off the pond. Suddenly, he turned and took me in his arms. He was sorry about the closet, he murmured to my neck.
After dinner, we moved to the living room, and Mrs. Onassis had me sit beside her on the sofa as she poured the mint tea into fine china cups. She sat erect like a dancer. John was by the window, telling a story about some boat mishap earlier, and the dim room shimmered with laughter. He was across the room, and I missed him. Through the picture window, I could see that the rain had started. After everyone else had been served, she handed me a cup; it trembled for a second against the blue and white bone saucer. I looked down, trying to think of something intriguing or smart to say. But she began, her voice a low infectious whisper. My dress was lovely. And how had I done my hair, she wanted to know, drawing me out like a cat.
I looked up—his mother’s face, so open in the soft, broken light.
When the summer was over, John told me that his mother had given him some advice: Now that you are with Christina, you must be a man. She’d counseled that in the past, it had been different, but now he needed to grow up, to take charge and protect me. I was, she told him, very feminine. We were twenty-six then, but neither of us talked about what that meant. It hung like a treasure map between us. Inside, I smiled. This must be a good thing. That she had said it. That he had told me.
For years after that first weekend, even when my romance with him was over, there would be a letter from her now and then. On occasion, she would call—she’d seen me in a play or on television, or there was a book of hers she wanted me to have. It would arrive by messenger, and slipped inside the fresh pages would be an oblong cream card with the decorous Doubleday anchor at the top: Tho
ught you’d like this, love Jackie.
The letters—on pale-blue stationery in blue pen, or on heavy lapis correspondence cards embossed with a white scallop (and one black-and-white postcard of Pierrot)—I kept tied with a red ribbon in a shoe box. The last arrived a month and a half before she died, before I flew back from Los Angeles to attend her funeral Mass at St. Ignatius Loyola—police barricades outside the baroque church and a slew of perfect white flowers blanketing her coffin.
“I hope all goes well,” she wrote in the last letter in her artful, tended script.
And whenever she called—there would be her voice, more like music than speech, and I would feel a small thrill, like the kind you get from a cloak-and-dagger crush you want always to stay secret.
In the spring of 1991, five months after it had ended with John, I came home to a message on my answering machine. Excited and flustered, as though an idea had just come to her, she said, “I think I have someone to help you with your career. Call me, bye … It’s Jackie.”
The truth was, I didn’t know what to call her. She was more than Jackie by then, more than John’s mother, more than Mrs. Onassis. But there had never been a word for it, never the right word. I thought back to that first summer—how we’d gone from wary shyness, to approval, to enjoyment. And now I just missed her.
I remembered how she giggled when she ate ice cream in August and how her walk at times had a kind of slow swagger. I remembered a party early on when I’d failed to greet her as soon as we arrived. She had been standing by the windows in her living room with what I thought of as Important New York People, and I didn’t want to interrupt. But a few days later, in the limo on the way to see a play for John’s birthday, she made sure to correct me. Maurice, Caroline, and Ed were there as well, but she did it so gracefully, marking her displeasure in such a way that no one else knew, and I never made the mistake again.
And there was a windy ride one summer on Mr. Tempelsman’s boat. I was alone with her on the back deck; we were on our way to pick up John, who was spearfishing off Gay Head. The whole way, she told me stories, the ones I wanted—not of the White House, but of her adventures in Greece and India and of the balls and parties she’d gone to in Newport and Southampton before she was married, when she was a girl in New York.
I smiled, thinking of a spring evening a year later, when I’d run into her at the theater, a production of Macbeth with Christopher Plummer and Glenda Jackson. John was studying for finals that night, and I went alone. Afterward, she and Mr. Tempelsman offered me a lift in their Town Car, and when we passed the marquee for Speed-the-Plow, she lit up. Had I seen it? I hadn’t. The play, she said, was good, but Madonna was terrible. She drew out the last word, each sparkling ounce of syllable brimming with glee. The tabloids had been rife with stories about them that spring, stories he scoffed at. I leaned closer. “I think you should go,” his mother said, smiling. “I think you should go next week—and have John take you. And go backstage!”
I remembered also how she always made a point of complimenting me—my hair or some detail of what I wore. At first, because of who she was, it stunned me. But what may have been good manners or the desire to nurture confidence in a young woman became for me a lesson in feminine grace and the poise of acceptance. She required that. And I learned, in the end, to simply thank her.
I replayed the message before I called her back, listening once more to the glide of her voice. Then I dialed the office number. It was the first time we’d spoken since Christmas, since I was no longer her son’s girlfriend, and if I expected awkwardness, there was none. We caught up. We spoke of other things.
Then she explained why she had called. There was someone she thought I should meet, an author who was also a producer. Should she give him my number? Yes, that would be fine, Mrs. Onassis, I said, and thanked her.
“Oh,” she said, stopping me, and for a rich moment I could almost hear her mind whirring before she landed. “Call me Jackie.”
Whether it was an earned intimacy or an acknowledgment of the shift between us, I didn’t know. But the following year, when I ran into her at a production of The Eumenides at the Brooklyn Armory and she greeted me with the same delight she always had and gave me a ride home in the Town Car, I called her Mrs. Onassis, as I always had.
On July 18, 1986, the day before Caroline’s wedding, I took three cabs, a train, and a plane in my eight-and-a-half-hour journey to Hyannis Port from the wilds of northwestern Connecticut, where I was in rehearsals for a summer stock production of Wendy Wasserstein’s Isn’t It Romantic. We were six days from the opening at the Sharon Playhouse, and Robin Saex, the director, had shuffled and juggled so that I could attend the wedding. When the flight, delayed several hours by fog, finally landed at Barnstable Municipal Airport, the rehearsal dinner was long over, and there was a note waiting at the Provincetown–Boston Airline ticket desk: “Gone home, take cab, Come quick baby!”
I couldn’t wait to see him, and as the cabdriver began to load my luggage into the trunk, I smiled, knowing that John would tease me when he saw what I’d brought for the thirty-six-hour stay. I had tried to pare down, putting clothes in piles of importance—yes, maybe, what are you thinking?—and shifting them back and forth, until finally, the agony of decision became too much, and I stuffed everything in. My dress, thankfully, had been decided. It was borrowed from Stanley Platos, a society designer. An ex-boyfriend’s mother worked for Halston and knew Stanley well, and she thought he would have just the thing. It wasn’t low-cut or short or tight, the way I tended to lean. It was sophisticated, a “lady dress”—the first I’d ever worn—and I worried that it would be right.
It was still early in our relationship—I was just beginning to get to know his family—and with the invitation came the understanding that along with performing a host of best man duties, John would be his mother’s official escort. He’d be seated with her at the dinner, and although Maurice would also be there, she would require John’s attention. She was concerned about how I would feel, he said, but when I reassured him that I would be fine on my own and had friends who were going, I received the thick envelope with the engraved response card in the mail. I had a reservation at Dunfey’s, the hotel in Hyannis where many of the guests were staying, but a few days before the wedding, I was invited to stay at the house. As the cab got closer, I was afraid I would be intruding.
I’d been to the Cape house twice before, but on that night, everything looked different. The Compound, as the press and locals called it, was really a cluster of three houses, the largest bought by Joseph P. Kennedy in 1929 and the two adjacent “cottages” acquired later by John’s father and his uncle Bobby. The Shriver family had a house nearby. There was a large pool and tennis courts, and at the main house, a circular drive and a towering flagpole. As we approached Irving Avenue and the sea, there were detours and barricades, along with a smattering of onlookers milling about on the road—the next day at the church there would be thousands. It was still foggy, and the streetlamps cast an eerie light. Suddenly, the cars ahead came to a dead stop, and police began directing vehicles without clearance to turn back. As an officer approached, I rolled down the window.
“I’m a friend of John’s.”
“I’m sorry, miss, but we can’t let you through.”
“Could you at least call the house? They’re expecting me.”
“I’m sorry, miss. We can’t disturb the family. You’ll have to move along.”
The driver grew impatient and began swerving up a driveway to turn around. “I’m dropping you at a pay phone in town, lady.”
“Wait!” I implored. There was a screech of tires, and the driver threw me a look.
Just then, through the haze, John appeared, barefoot and shirtless, an orange sarong tied low at his waist.
“It’s all right, Officer, she’s with me.”
The policeman’s gruff demeanor dropped at once. “Mr. Kennedy, I had no idea. Our orders were to—”
“N
o harm done,” John said, exchanging enough small talk to put the man at ease.
He took a bag in each hand, and I carried the dress, safe in its plastic sheath, and the wide-brimmed black hat I planned to wear the next day. “Nice,” he said. “Going down the Nile, are we?” Then he led me past the small crowd at Scudder and Irving, through a high hedge, and down the walkway to the back door of his father’s house.
Before we went in, he pulled me from the porch light and held me tight. “Where’ve you been? I missed you.” He smelled of sun and Eau Sauvage.
I expected everyone to be asleep, but they were all gathered around the kitchen table, laughing. In keeping with tradition, Ed was about to leave to spend the night at a house nearby. Maurice was staying elsewhere, too. Caroline smiled. She was tanned and relaxed, more serene than I could ever imagine being. She greeted me warmly, and his mother turned and rose from the table.
“We’re so glad you’re here! You poor thing, you’ve come so far.”
“It’s been an adventure.”
“Well, you’re here now. Are you hungry? Marta, Efigenio, heat up some of those lovely leftovers from the rehearsal dinner.”
I sat down at the table, and as Marta fussed over a plate, John began teasing his sister—one last grand ribbing before she was a married lady. He kept trying to get a rise, but each time she bested him. Even he couldn’t faze her.
His mother always seemed beguilingly girlish to me, and that night even more so. She spoke excitedly of preparations, of how well the rehearsal had gone, how delightful the dinner had been, and who would be in what car on the way to Our Lady of Victory Church in Centerville the next morning. Then her face brightened.
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