The Editor

by Steven Rowley

  I stop only once, for coffee.

  My mother called when she heard the news that Jackie had died. We talked and she did motherly things like ask if I was okay and listened to me when I answered. She told me about the day when Bobby was assassinated. To her it was like she tucked her children safely in bed in one world, a world she understood if not entirely admired, and we all woke up in another world that didn’t have any rules at all. It was nice to hear her memories and be able to pair them with faint ones of my own.

  We talk, not often, but regularly now. She’s even softening on the book, or so I hear from Naomi. Apparently my mother calls her local library to put the book on hold; when her number comes up, she removes her name from the list then calls to add it again—just to make the book seem in demand. It’s her little game and she seems to enjoy it.

  “If you tell her I told you, you’re dead,” Naomi threatened. But still it was information she thought I needed to hear. Naomi even admitted she goes “undercover” to her local bookstore to face copies on bookshelves out and exclaim emphatically how good the book is when anyone is in earshot.

  The last time my mother and I spoke, she asked about my search for Frank. This didn’t seem like prurient curiosity, but an understanding that I was going through something traumatic and could use, at the very least, a friend. When I said I had instead gone to see my father at the nursing home, she asked how he was and offered to go with me if I wanted to go again. It was a good reminder that when it came to my father, she too was nursing a broken heart.

  None of this makes me certain that she will actually get in my car today, and when I pull in her driveway I realize how nervous I really am. How essential I have come to see this trip as part of our healing. How easy it would be for her to say no. Despite our renewed relationship, despite her trip into the city on her own, my mother is still a woman most comfortable within a close radius of home. I fidget in the car like a young man picking up a prom date, sweating even in the car’s AC, wondering where to pin the corsage. Only after I see her appear in the bay window do I get out and walk up the drive.

  “Hi,” I say when she answers the door.

  “Hi,” she says in return while looking down the driveway to see if anyone else is with me, or if there is otherwise cause for alarm.

  “I was wondering . . .” I start. “I was thinking . . .” That’s no better. I hate that this is so hard.

  “What were you thinking?” She says it without any trace of the accusatory tone that would have previously poisoned a question like that.

  “Do you have any interest . . .” Good Christ, spit it out. “Do you want to go for a ride?”

  My mother looks back at the house, at all the reasons to say no, the cleaning, the dishes, the ironing, the safety of her own bed, years of patterns and habits and fears, and then at me, and finally over my shoulder at the world beyond, at the future that beckons gently to us both.

  “What do I need to bring?”

  When I share our destination, she suggests I stay the night and we start fresh on the road in the morning. The drive, after all, will take us five hours due south. I agree, and we get take-out sandwiches and head for an evening walk in Stewart Park along the shores of Cayuga Lake—something we did a lot when I was young. We find just the right bench looking out over the water under the shade of a large willow tree.

  “How is your writing?”

  “It’s good,” I say, as I peel back the wax paper around my sandwich. “Maybe a little chaotic.” I laugh gently, since I’m writing next about my father. “My subject has doubled in scope.” I want to tell her there are days when I wonder why I’m doing this to the family again, but she seems to understand this time that it’s my story to write. “In truth, I haven’t written much since Jackie died.”

  “I suppose it’s not a race, what you do.” My mother takes a bite of her sandwich before lifting the bread to see what’s inside. “Did you find anything more on Frank?”

  “I think after seeing Dad I kind of stopped looking. He was my father, for better or worse.” I open a bag of barbecue potato chips and offer her one, before correcting myself. “Is.”

  She takes a chip and says, “Thank you.”

  “Maybe one day I’ll start the search again. Maybe this new book will prompt me to. But right now I don’t feel pressure.”

  “I know you wonder what happened. To us.”

  “To you and Frank? Or to you and Dad.”

  “To you and me.”

  I listen for a moment as the water laps the shore. “Right.” It’s part of the mystery I still haven’t solved.

  “When you settled on writing, you started questioning. You wanted an answer to everything, even the questions you didn’t yet know to ask.”

  I remember how relentless I was at first, like a reporter on a new beat wanting to prove his worth.

  “I was afraid you would find out about Frank before I had the courage to tell you. And if that happened, I would lose you forever.”

  The sun is setting and house lights start to dot the far shores of the lake like shimmering fireflies.

  “It must have been lonely. Keeping that inside all this time.”

  She considers this. “The days were long, but the years piled up very quickly.”

  I’m suddenly overcome with a longing to see Jackie, to tell her I did it—that I was not consumed by the Sphinx. In this moment I solved my riddle, here, at dusk, as the lake and the sky become one color. Jackie pushed me so hard on the book’s ending, but it was really another ending she had in mind all along. This one, right here, right now, my mother and I together.

  We finish our sandwiches and my mother offers me her pickle like she used to do when I was a kid. It’s something, because I know that she really loves pickles. The air is cool and it’s a nice change from the stickiness of this warm early summer, and we sit together until the mosquitos get the best of us.

  In the very last of the day’s light, with only a tiny orange ribbon above the hills on the horizon, she asks, “How about some ice cream? My treat.”

  On the way home, we stop to get cones at a place with a walk-up window. “On our next trip I’ll treat for ice cream,” I tell her. “I know just where to go.”

  “Oh, yeah? Where’s that.”

  “Mad Martha’s on Martha’s Vineyard. They serve something called the Pig’s Delight.”

  My mother makes a sour face as she holds her single scoop. “That sounds awful. Let’s do it.”

  In the morning we surprise Kenny at his house by leaving him with Domino and a bag of dry food. Ellen, seeing my mother and me together, immediately intervenes and says she’s happy to dog-sit; we hit the road just after dawn. We ride for the first few hours mostly in pleasant silence, stopping for coffee and plain donuts crisp with the flavor of nutmeg. At one point my mother slips off her sandals, sets her bare feet on the dash, cracks the window, and lets the morning air rake over her like she’s performing some sort of cleansing ritual. It’s cleansing for me too.

  Despite heavy traffic around Washington, we arrive at Arlington National Cemetery by early afternoon. It feels good to stretch our legs. We meander through the visitors’ center, collecting a map and several brochures. Buses of boisterous kids fill the entrance, and because of the time of year I can’t tell if they are here on the rowdy last days of school or the excited first days of summer camp. JFK’s grave is only a short walk from the entrance, but we take a circuitous route, almost as if to prolong the errand and ditch the organized tour groups.

  “Did you know Taft is the only other president buried here?” I ask while skimming through a list of notable graves.

  “Maybe we should drop in on him,” my mother says, as if he were an old family friend.

  But instead of stopping we pass by Taft and continue along Sherman Drive to Arlington House, before cutting in along a walkway to our
destination.

  “Have you ever been here?” I ask, wondering, as much as the Kennedys meant to her, if she has somehow made this pilgrimage before.

  “No. You?”

  “No.”

  The entrance to President Kennedy’s grave consists of an elliptical plaza featuring a low wall of granite stones etched with quotations from his inaugural address. We stop and read them, and my mother circles back to read them again. I step away to take in the Washington Monument, which towers in the distance—we’re both stalling for time. I watch as my mother waits for a group of kids to move on so she can run her fingers across the lettering on the first stone: LET THE WORD GO FORTH FROM THIS TIME AND PLACE TO FRIEND AND FOE ALIKE THAT THE TORCH HAS BEEN PASSED TO A NEW GENERATION OF AMERICANS. I know she remembers watching this address as she has told the story many times; I was in her arms, less than three months old. I take a few steps back to give her even more privacy and wonder what the words meant to her then, when she was part of that next generation, and what they mean to her now that there is a new generation behind her. When she completes her second pass, she takes her cross necklace and holds it tightly in her hand before kissing it.

  She finds me in the plaza and I offer my hand and she takes it. Together we step forward to the actual graves and wait behind several people for our turn. My heart pounds in my chest. I’ve imagined this moment many times—introducing my mother to Jackie. Never once like this, but still. I’m finally bringing these women together.

  John Kennedy’s grave marker lies flush with the ground, JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY 1917–1963, surrounded by smaller stones set in the grass. All three are simple and unceremonious, without any elaborate adornment. Behind him, the Eternal Flame, dancing on the breeze. To the right, a fresh burial, a mound of earth.

  Jackie.

  “There’s no stone,” I say, poorly masking my disappointment. How can I pay my respects to a fresh mound of dirt?

  My mother nods. “There will be.”

  All of it, so new. It’s hard to remember just a few weeks ago I was working on a book, hoping to impress my editor again. It seems so long ago, and yet it is so recent they haven’t even placed a marker.

  “The children,” my mother whispers, her voice quivering. She indicates two smaller gravestones. One says simply DAUGHTER AUGUST 23, 1956. Stillborn. The other PATRICK BOUVIER KENNEDY AUGUST 7, 1963–AUGUST 9, 1963. It’s such a stark reminder of the lives Jackie lived before we ever met, of the sadness that seemed to encircle her.

  “He predeceased his father by only ten weeks.” I point to Patrick’s grave. How is this not something we remember more clearly? It’s almost unthinkable, a sitting president losing a child. How is this not one of the first things that springs to mind when remembering him?

  Because history tragically intervened.

  My mother produces a travel packet of Kleenex and gently wipes her eyes, before offering a tissue to me. I take one, but I’m not feeling imminent tears. “I wish there was a stone for Jackie.” The trip isn’t even over and already it feels incomplete.

  “I’m sorry it’s not how you wanted this to be.”

  “None of this is how I wanted it to be.” I summon my dormant Catholicism and say a silent prayer.

  . . . we therefore commit her body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust . . .

  And then, when finished, I whisper, “Good-bye, Mrs. Onassis.”

  We step to the left to make room for other visitors waiting their turn and then out of the way completely. We find a quiet spot down the walk.

  “I thought we were . . . close. She never even told me she was sick. I had to read the details in People magazine like everyone else.”

  “Well.”

  “Well, what?”

  “You weren’t close.”

  I turn and give my mother a look like she just slapped me across the face. Why would she say such a thing?

  “You weren’t,” she says, doubling down.

  We stare intently at each other, neither of us blinking or backing away. I want to yell and scream and stomp my feet in childish tantrum, but of course she’s right. I would like to think that I was as unique to Jackie as she was to me. But who am I to think that? Of course I wasn’t. I was but one in a long line of people who entered her life, who fussed and fawned and invented a relationship that wasn’t entirely there.

  “You weren’t.” My mother takes my arm and tucks hers around it and pulls me tight to her and I realize her telling me this is not hateful, it’s not even mean-spirited, it’s just the level truth. She’s telling me this in part to keep me from spiraling over this loss, to keep me moving forward, and maybe, in part, to tell me that she and I in fact are the ones who are.

  Close.

  “I’m beginning to see that now.” My face grows red at the harsh candor of it all and from no small amount of embarrassment for my behavior over the last two years.

  “But she was very fond of you.”

  I feel my cheeks with the backs of my hands and they feel warm, almost sunburned. “Oh, how do you know,” I say, as if she’s a bother.

  “She told me.”

  My head turns at lightning speed. “What?”

  My mother freezes, like a child caught with a hand in the cookie jar. “She called me and told me so.”

  I’m not sure whether to ask how or why or when.

  “Well, she had my number, thanks to you. From Thanksgiving.”

  “What did she say?”

  “We just talked, mother to mother.”

  I’m losing my patience. “What. Did. She. Say.”

  I think of all the things Jackie and I discussed in private, how I felt these conversations belonged to me and me alone. There are still things I haven’t told even Daniel. They were special treasures I had, and they are to this day among my most prized. There’s a good chance my mother feels that way about their conversation, but I don’t care. I have to know what was said.

  “We talked about motherhood. About you, and our children. She invited me personally to the book party, so I came. You don’t say no to the First Lady.”

  “Did she say anything else?”

  My mother looks up at the sky as if she’s trying hard to remember. “Oh, yes. In the end she said, ‘If they grow up to be all right, that is our vengeance on the world.’”

  I nod as this sinks in. “And did they?” I ask. “Turn out all right?”

  My mother brings her gaze down from the clouds. We both turn back and look at the graves one last time, watch as the Eternal Flame, lit by Jackie herself, dances in the gentle wind. “You bet your ass they did.”

  It’s unlike my mother to cuss, and it’s always the most emphatic punctuation when she does.

  We continue along the path toward Bobby’s grave, and we when we reach it, another flat stone, this time in front of a white cross, we stand quietly and take it in. People have thrown coins, pennies mostly, on the grave.

  “Francis”—my mother says, and I don’t know if she’s addressing me, reading the grave, or remembering another time with Frank—“why me? Of everyone. I think about that. Why did you write about me?”

  I look at her in wonder. How in the world could she not know this? “You’re the most extraordinary woman I’ve ever met.”

  My mother winces. (So this is where I get my difficulty hearing compliments.) “Well,” she says, unsure how respond. “Until recently.” She nods back up the walkway toward Jackie.

  I sit on my reply until my mother turns her head back and is looking me square in the eye. “That I’ve ever met.”

  We stand there, panicked in the face of such honesty, each unsure what to do next. There’s a sting in my eyes and I can see it in hers too before it grows too strong and I almost can’t see. “Oh, Francis.” The way she says it lifts a burdensome weight off of me, one I’ve wor
n so long it had become like a second skin, and I know in that moment that I am her boy again.

  Acknowledgments

  The Editor is a work of fiction. This novel is not intended to be a definitive portrait of Jacqueline Onassis’s time in publishing, but rather my interpretation of a woman at the height of a remarkable career. There are two nonfiction books that I highly recommend if you are curious to know more about her professional life: Reading Jackie: Her Autobiography in Books by William Kuhn and Jackie as Editor: The Literary Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis by Greg Lawrence, as well as countless other biographies that touch on her extraordinary third act. Nevertheless, I would like to thank Mrs. Onassis for her intelligence, her strength, her grace, her style, her leadership, and for being a continuing inspiration to many, including me.

  Thanking one’s agent has become de rigueur; instead I will thank my friend Rob Weisbach. Your contributions to this book are many, and they won’t ever be forgotten. You challenge me, you inspire me, you cheer me on—there are days I don’t even want to order lunch without running it by you first. (How do you feel about the chopped salad for me?) Every writer should be lucky enough to have such a fierce advocate and generous teammate.

  I owe an enormous debt to my editor, Sally Kim. Your clear and vibrant editorial vision made you a true partner in this endeavor; your fingerprints are on every page. From our meet-cute at a bookstore (shout-out to Pages: A Bookstore in Manhattan Beach, California) to the first time we knocked back a daiquiri, you led me down a path of discovery, just as Jackie did for James. Thank you for the marvelous journey.

  I couldn’t have found a better home than I have at Putnam. I’m grateful for their energetic team, especially Ivan Held, Alexis Welby, Katie McKee, Ashley McClay, Christine Ball, Emily Mlynek, Jordan Aaronson, and Gaby Mongelli.