Jack's Widow (20 page)

F
rom the moment the decision was made Jackie was aware that she would have to tell the Kennedy family in advance so that they would be prepared. It was not fair to allow a situation where her in-laws could be upset further. In another family she could just get on the phone. Tempting but disastrous. She would have to arrange to see one of them.

She decided that she would wait until a few days before the wedding scheduled for October, before letting them in on her secret. It had to be a talk-and-run situation.

The entire family was still in shock. She knew all of them would invoke her children, her late husband’s memory, anything for this marriage not to go ahead. She couldn’t have this conversation anywhere public.

Apart from never wanting to be seen arguing in public, she had promised Harry Blackstone that no one other than the Kennedys would know anything about the forthcoming marriage until her mother made an announcement shortly before the actual event. This gave him and the agency a little time to set things up. Just this
morning he had called to say that the boat with the new equipment and two scientists had already sailed.

She decided that the only person she could speak to was her mother-in-law. Jackie knew that Rose was in New York for a few days on an autumn shopping expedition. As a dutiful mother, Jackie always made sure that her children saw a great deal of their grandmother when she was in town.

Nervously she paced and smoked, smoked and paced. In one way it would be easiest to handle this at home, but as Jackie had always been most fearful of being trapped in a situation that she couldn’t get out of, she discounted it. If things went badly she knew it would be just too rude for her to leave.

She remembered that the Kennedys still had an office in the city. Because she and Jack had always been based in Washington, Jackie had never been there. By the time she moved to New York her father-in-law was too unwell to travel so she always saw her in-laws up on the Cape. This would be the best place for this confrontation.

In her usual disguise of sunglasses and headscarf, Jackie traveled downtown. She was shown upstairs to a suite of high-ceilinged, well-furnished rooms. The largest overlooked the Hudson River, in the distance the Statue of Liberty was clearly visible. There was an expansive partners’ desk, two sofas, and an antique bookcase. The walls painted in severe gray were completely covered in photographs, all in matching frames. There was a small one of the old Fitzgerald clan in Boston, a portrait of Rose with her husband and their children when young. The rest, many of which she had never seen before, were pictures of her dead husband and his mother sailing, playing touch football, going to church in Washington, in Hyannisport, in Boston, in Palm Beach, in the Vatican. On the beach, on the hustings, at the White House, in the Rose Garden, in the Oval Office, in the Senate, at two Democratic conventions, in the embassy garden by London’s Regent’s Park. The largest photograph, covering virtually a whole wall, was of her dead husband gazing out to sea, flanked by the Stars and Stripes.

Despite the light coming through the windows, the whole room seemed like a bleak chapel dedicated to the late president. Jackie was perturbed and upset. Could it be that while the rest of them had moved on no one had acknowledged the depth of loss felt by her mother-in-law? To have lost so many of your children, now four of them, including Jack’s elder brother and sister and Bobby, must be so hard, particularly when one of those, an infant that you had cradled, had been taken away from you at the pinnacle of his success.

Jackie thought that there would be nothing worse, nothing more impossible to be borne, than the untimely, early death of a child. To lose four was unbearable.

She walked around, touched her almost life-sized dead husband’s face. It was only eight-thirty
A.M.
Her instinct told her that this was not the place to be talking of new marriages, of new lives, of love, of hope. She could sneak away. She would have to talk to her mother-in-law somewhere else.

She was getting up when the obliging secretary, thrilled to be in on this little secret, returned with coffee specially made the way she had been assured the former First Lady liked it. Putting down a small tray, she chattered on, oblivious to the desperate need of her guest to escape.

“How long has this office been like this?” the widow asked quietly.

“Lovely, isn’t it?” said the secretary, placing the white lilies, which she had read in the
National Enquirer
were the former First Lady’s favorites, on the low table.

“Whenever Mrs. Kennedy finds a picture of her and the president together we get it framed by the same place. The framer won’t charge, he loves the whole family so much. Sometimes we just hear of a picture and we get someone to track it down. One or two of them have arrived in a real mess and they have to phone the paper or the photographer for a new print. I guess we’ll run out of wall eventually.”

Then, embarrassed at what she had said, the secretary made to leave but turned around when she realized she was being followed
out of the door. One look and she sensed that the visitor wanted to exit fast.

“I guess this room must be upsetting, I should have taken you to another part of the office,” she started. Then her voice trailed away when she saw Jackie give a resigned sigh as the outer door began to open. They watched as it opened fully. It was the post delivery.

The postman was so taken aback at the sight of the former First Lady that he dropped several small parcels and letters right in front of the door. By the time he had cleared them it was too late. She could hear her mother-in-law saying her cheery hellos as she walked down the corridor.

Jackie took a deep breath and returned to the inner sanctum.

“For God’s sake, why?” Rose had cried when she told her.

It was as Jackie had expected.

“Wouldn’t it be best to go to your grave as a great man’s widow? Wouldn’t history judge you better?

“Wouldn’t your children judge you better?” Rose smiled sadly.

When Jackie tried to say that she was in love the older woman turned on her.

“You, you are loved by this entire nation, by the whole world. You don’t need love.

“It’s money, isn’t it? More money! You were left enough, then the family gave you more, I fixed that for you. But it’s not enough, never enough for you, is it?”

Jackie whispered: “It would just be good to have someone care about me, really care,” she said as she bent to pick up her bag.

“Yes, I know things weren’t perfect. But he loved you in his way, like Joe loved me,” said her mother-in-law.

They had never discussed this before. Never. Not during her marriage when he had taken holidays without her, after his death on the days that the dreadful stories about his affairs had appeared in the press, nor even later during the family holidays at Hyannisport.

Jackie was poised to flee but she felt that she had to say something in her own defense.

“I never, ever raised this with you or any of your family.”

The tears behind the words threatened to gush out. “None of you, not one of you, I may add, ever rang me up to ask me how I was feeling about those stories, or suggested how best to hide them from the children or how to stop the newspapers from printing any more of them. But let’s face it, this is what the men in this family do as a hobby, as a sideline.

“So don’t tell me you didn’t know.”

Rose held her hand up.

“You know it meant nothing,” she replied quietly. “The boys saw it like getting a cup of coffee, not even that much, a coffee warms you at least. He loved you.” Saying this, she came toward Jackie and pointed at the wall with its life-sized portrait.

“Look at him, he was beautiful. How can you face
him
after him?”

Jackie turned to face her mother-in-law, a woman she had known for more than sixteen years, but still didn’t know at all.

“You don’t understand. I don’t feel safe here anymore, I feel under threat in New York, in this country.” Jackie sobbed and for the very first time began to tell someone about the robbery and the rape.

“I have never felt so low, so used, so belittled.” Her sobs filled the room. At the end of it both women were in tears. Rose gently reiterated that she would rather Jackie did not marry but she understood her pain and her fears.

Then Rose gave Jackie something her own mother had withheld, her blessing.

Three days later Jackie was on a boat traveling from Athens to Skorpios.

She was the first to see it. The island looked like a green and gray opal on the smooth Ionian Sea.

Private, guarded, safe.

Someone handed her some binoculars. She was pointing things out and explaining to the others.

There was the big house with its entry lined with silk the color of walnuts visible through the open collonaded porch. Around the walls lit by mirrored sconces were long linen-covered tables littered with elegant hurricane lamps. Through the airy hall was the glass-covered orangerie with its twin lap pools beyond. One was tiled the same shade as stonewashed jeans, the other in pure indigo. The Greek always explained that he had chosen them so that his casually dressed visitors in jeans would feel at home.

The pale pink building was wide and spare. Its twelve bedrooms all had balconies overlooking the sea. Joined to it by a tributary of paths were wisteria-covered pergolas, bottle-green tennis courts, and several exquisite summer houses painted in shades of melon, fig, and strawberry, each tiny home accessorized with everything matching from steamer chairs, recliners, hammocks, and awnings down to table linen and china.

“Keeps the place tidy,” her brand-new fiancé had said. “No one gets their things mixed up. The children like feeling independent, away from the servants, probably away from me, you know…”

He shrugged with a minimal smile.

They had spent many hours discussing his two children, who still blamed him for their parents’ divorce. She wondered if they had been told about the wedding, if they would be there.

At least their intransigence meant that the whole place with its simple miniature houses was in perfect taste, unlike the boat she stood on or for that matter the plane she had just left.

Still, taste wasn’t everything. She laughed to herself. If only the outside world knew that her priorities had so changed.

Harry had explained in detail to her that there was another side to the island when the sea looked bad-tempered and the trees sullen. “It can get cold and choppy,” he said. “This is why we need to get to work. The weather will be too bad for you to hang around in winter. When you are not there we can’t do much either.”

She told him that she would be on the island for at least six weeks during the summer holidays while secretly preparing for the wedding.

“We won’t be doing any entertaining. We don’t want to tip anyone off until just beforehand,” explained Jackie.

“That’s fine. Just by being here we can have people around on the island that are not expected. It means the Russians can’t work out who is working for you or who is working for us.”

Now at last the preparations were over. Almost against her will, Jackie’s mother came to the island and brought her stepfather, Uncle Hughdie.

Needless to say Janet was unhappy about the engagement but had made the announcement because it was correct form.

From her vantage point at the front of the yacht Jackie thought the island, named after the scorpion because of its shape, looked perfect today. Even in October the sea was almost purple, the shade often mentioned in Greek mythology as wine-colored. Jackie remembered how in the heat of the summer the flowers and plants had released their fragrance for the plea sure of the butterflies.

Apart from the jetty the whole place looked empty.

It was just what she had dreamed of.

She looked behind her at the rest of the adults on the ship. How brilliant of Rose to ensure that several Kennedys came to the wedding.

“We want to look united,” explained her mother-in-law. “That has always been our strength. I’ll see that you are not alone.”

They both knew that public opinion would be against her, that they would hate the idea that she would be taking a divorced foreigner, who lacked Prince Charming looks, to her bed, not to mention relinquishing her role as a widow, still mourning the slain presidential prince.

Jackie had discussed this with Harry too. His advice had been, “A baby, Jackie, just something as simple as that, as quickly as possible. It would have the public eating out of your hand.”

Jackie knew that Rose would not have liked this idea, but Ari was enthusiastic.

Her mother-in-law had not only persuaded two of her daughters and their families to go to Greece as part of the wedding party, she
had already made it known to the family that she thought Jackie was entitled to any happiness that she could find. She also promised her daughter-in-law that after the wedding was announced she would repeat this to the news media.

The whole group was becoming excited now that they could see ten sailors standing on the dock in a navy and white line. Their broad shoulders were accentuated by the gold braid and buttons that adorned the epaulettes of neat navy cable-stitched sweaters. Crisp white shorts meant that twenty tanned muscular legs were also on parade. Each of them had sworn loyalty only to the Greek.

From Saturday they would extend that allegiance to her and her children. She told herself that whatever happened, whatever people said, this was what she had needed. This was the best she could have done.

Reassured, she turned to look at the faces crowding the ship’s rail. Her children and their cousins watching as the crew worked at bringing the boat into harbor. Her sisters-in-law, tall and angular, their pale faces slightly pink, already hyped up by the flight to Athens on the private plane. Their husbands in determinedly happy mode, lips creased into smiles that didn’t quite reach their eyes. Her mother and stepfather doing the best that they could.