1400069106Secret

by Unknown

  So when Tony gave me an opening to save our engagement—all I had to do was never speak again about President Kennedy—I seized on it immediately as a lifeline. This wasn’t forgiveness. But it did let us move on. This is why I agreed to remain silent. If shutting out everything about the President would keep Tony in my life, and save me from embarrassment, I could live with that.

  The next four days at my parents’ house were dominated by nonstop coverage of the President’s death on every TV channel. My younger sister and my parents stayed glued to the set in our pine-paneled library, but I did my best to avoid it.

  Instead, I helped my mother in the kitchen, preparing meals that everyone but me ate in front of the television. It was impossible to avoid catching glimpses of the enormous crowds passing the flag-draped coffin in the Capitol rotunda, the breaking news of Lee Harvey Oswald’s murder in Dallas, the funeral procession in Washington to St. Matthew’s Cathedral, brothers Bobby and Ted walking behind the horse-drawn caisson, little John’s salute, Mrs. Kennedy’s brittle face, hovering between crying and stoic grace, at Arlington National Cemetery while a twenty-one-gun salute sounded and Air Force One made a farewell flyover.

  But I willed myself to feel nothing as the heartbreaking images floated by. I didn’t cry or shed a tear, not once.

  If my mother and father were puzzled by my detachment and stoicism, they never said anything about it. They didn’t ask me why I didn’t even try to go to Washington to bear witness. Part of me, of course, desperately longed to be there, to grieve with all my friends at the White House. But I was determined to honor Tony’s demand.

  Tony, for his part, was completing his Army tour of duty, which kept us apart for a big chunk of the time before the wedding. But even when we were together, as much as I tried to deny it, the tenor of our relationship was different. We had always been light and playful with each other, as if we didn’t have a care in the world. Now I felt a creeping unease with him, as if he was constantly scrutinizing me and finding me wanting. I attributed this to his justifiable anger but thought—hoped—that it would fade with time and the joy of our wedding and honeymoon.

  Tony and I were married on January 4, 1964, at Christ Episcopal Church in Middletown, New Jersey. Our wedding photos show a happy, carefree young couple, smiling, dancing, feeding each other the traditional piece of cake. I had seven attendants, including my sister Buffy as maid of honor and Marnie Stuart, Kirk Dyett, and Wendy Taylor among my bridesmaids. I wore my mother’s wedding dress, as our wedding announcement in The New York Times would note, of “ivory satin in modified Empire style with an heirloom rose point veil belonging to the bridegroom’s maternal grandmother.” I carried a bouquet of butterfly orchids. The bridesmaids carried pink roses and wore long, dark gowns of forest-green velvet, with bows of deeper green in their hair. All the groomsmen were listed, as were our boarding schools and colleges. Our grandparents were named. There was even a mention of the debutante balls where I had been “presented.”

  I had provided all the information to the newspaper for the announcement, so only I was aware that, among all the social details, there was a glaring omission about the bride: Whereas my engagement announcement a few months earlier had proudly noted that I had worked in the White House press office in 1962

  and 1963, my wedding announcement made no mention of it. It was as if that part of my life had never happened.

  *Smith would win the Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for his reporting of the Kennedy assassination.

  Chapter Twelve

  And just like that I was Mimi Fahnestock.

  I not only took on Tony’s name, I also took on all his ambitions for life. That meant settling in New York City, where, after his Army duty was up, he accepted a job at Morgan Guaranty. That meant setting up a home with him in a tiny apartment on East Seventy-eighth Street in Manhattan—a space so cramped I couldn’t open the oven door in the kitchen if the refrigerator was open. That meant cooking for him every night and supporting his career and getting a job myself and saving money to buy a bigger apartment or a house in the suburbs. That also meant sharing the not-too-distant goal of starting a family.

  We didn’t talk deeply or frequently about these mutual goals. We were of such similar backgrounds that we just accepted them as part of the life we were meant to live. Although I was only twenty, I embraced these ambitions with the unquestioning enthusiasm of someone who had always pictured herself as a happy homemaker. In this self-image in 1964, I was not much different from the majority of young women in America; bra-burning protests were still four or five years away. I was married and had my whole life in front of me.

  Our marriage lasted twenty-six years and can be divided, with eerie precision, into two distinct halves. The first thirteen years were happy ones; the rest were not. As a result, Tony and I divorced in 1990.

  There are countless reasons marriages fail. And the reasons don’t show up all at once. They accumulate as a couple goes through the ups and downs of building a life, pursuing careers, bringing children into the world and raising them and sending them back into the world, defining and redefining their notion of how to love and be loved in return. In some ways, Tony and I were no different from the millions of couples out there who started with the best intentions but grew apart over many years and eventually turned into semi-hostile strangers in their own home.

  For years I resisted pinning any blame for my failed marriage on my affair with JFK. I knew that telling Tony about the relationship that dark day in November 1963 wasn’t the most auspicious or healthy way to begin a marriage, but I never saw it as the thing that doomed our marriage from the start. After all, we had thirteen good years, producing two wonderful girls—and eventually six grandchildren. They are beyond precious to me, and I cannot imagine my life without them. So there’s that to be said for our marriage: It created most of what I hold dear.

  Years after the divorce, though, when I was a single woman on my own in Manhattan, I began to reconsider the impact that revealing my secret had on our marriage. I thought that given the happy years we shared, it was behind us.

  But I came to accept that my affair with JFK and Tony’s demand that I bury the subject forever were like two pathogens that we introduced into our marriage and that slowly, painfully, led to its death. Tony was never able to trust me completely after that day, and for good reason. Nothing could erase the depth of his hurt. He carried that baggage for our entire marriage. It was forever woven into the emotional fabric of our lives together, and I could sense it. The anger and jealousy never completely disappeared.

  I blame both of us for that. If we could have found a way to talk openly—and if we hadn’t had to treat the affair as a mark of my shame and Tony’s humiliation—then the secret’s poisonous power might have dissolved over time.

  The wise and mature thing to do—had I been wiser and more mature at this point in my life—would have been to confront Tony. I should have challenged him to make a choice: “What do you want to do?” I could have said. “Hold on to this anger for the rest of our lives?”

  I should have tried to make him appreciate that in that moment of utter confusion and grief when I exposed myself to him in his parents’ den, it was not only a gesture of honesty but one of faith as well—in him and his love for me. I should have reminded him that time heals most wounds and that it’s sometimes the most disastrous marital events—an awful family visit, a nightmarish vacation, a forgotten birthday, or some other breakdown in our expectations—that, over time, inspire the fondest and funniest memories in the retelling. If we could put this behind us, perhaps years later we could marvel over—even laugh about—the time when Tony’s wife had an affair with the President of the United States when she was very, very young.

  If only to maintain my dignity, maybe I should have drawn a line in the sand and said, “If you can’t forgive me, you shouldn’t marry me.” But I never said any of that. Not only that, I didn’t even think it. I didn’t have the self-confidence t
o assert myself with such a potentially devastating ultimatum. I didn’t have the maturity to see the toxic emotional climate my silence—our silence—would create in our marriage.

  Instead, I went about blithely purging any evidence of JFK from my existence, pretending it hadn’t happened. It wasn’t enough that my White House internship had been expunged from my wedding announcement. It wasn’t enough that I could never refer to my internship or mention the Kennedy name around Tony and our friends. It wasn’t enough that I made an effort to avoid reading or watching anything about JFK.* Even my private thoughts had to be controlled. If I allowed the President to pop into my mind or spent any time reflecting about my relationship with him, I believed it was like cheating on Tony. Guilt was always nipping at my heels.

  When Tony and I had gotten married, I had hidden away, in various places around our apartment, the three gifts from the President: the gold-and-diamond pins he gave me upon my engagement, the gray suit from Bloomingdale’s, and the photograph he had signed when I left Washington. As a few months passed and my feelings of guilt deepened, I came to see these gifts as evidence of a crime. And what do you do with evidence of a crime? You dispose of it.

  I did it all in one day, in 1964, while Tony was at work. I was going to secretarial school at the time, sharpening the typing and shorthand skills that had been in such short supply during my stint at the White House. I hadn’t found a job yet, so I had time during the day.

  I took the suit to a thrift shop along Second Avenue on the Upper East Side and, feeling a twinge of regret at sacrificing the most extravagant piece of clothing I owned, quietly handed it to the woman behind the counter.

  “What’s the matter, dear?” I remember her asking as she looked it over. “It looks brand-new. Doesn’t it fit anymore?”

  I stared blankly at her, saying nothing.

  Next were the gold-and-diamond pins. At first I considered tossing them down the incinerator chute in the hallway outside our apartment, but as I opened the chute door, I couldn’t bring myself to treat them as trash. They were too beautiful. I took them to a pawn shop on Twenty-third Street and Second Avenue, and handed them over, fighting back tears. I don’t recall how much the pawnbroker offered me, but I do remember that I was in no mood to bargain with him. I folded the cash in my purse and tossed the pawn ticket away as soon as I stepped outside. When it was done, I felt a strong sense of relief. I told myself I was fulfilling a duty to my husband.

  The last piece to go was the photograph. I felt such tenderness when I pulled it out from its hiding spot behind other pictures in a photo album. I took one last look at the image of the President, on his boat in a blue polo shirt and white khakis, his right hand on the wheel, as he smiled into the sun. I traced my fingers over the inscription: “To Mimi, with warmest regards and deep appreciation.” I recalled his mischievous conspiratorial tone when, upon finishing it, he’d looked at me and said, “Only you and I know what that really means.”

  I pulled a pair of scissors from the drawer and cut it into a hundred tiny pieces.

  I was so frantic and upset and paranoid about this photo—and the intimacy it called up—that I suddenly was overcome by a wild fear that someone might piece it together again. Tossing the pieces in a wastebasket or even the incinerator wouldn’t protect me. So I gathered them into a small gift bag and went out onto the street, where I parceled them out among several different trash cans around the neighborhood. If anyone wanted to trace the photo back to me, they’d have to dig through a lot of trash and use a lot of Scotch tape.

  Then I returned to the apartment and sat in the living room, waiting for Tony to come home. I must have believed that in ridding myself of the last vestiges of JFK, everything would be all right again. Tony would never come across them accidentally, not now. He could never confront me with questions that would lead back to my betrayal. I would not have to face the possibility of his anger. I had done the right thing for both of us. Or so I thought.

  That evening when Tony came home, he poured himself a drink and gave me a peck on the cheek. I asked about his day, and we settled into pleasant, banal small talk about his job. The safety I had imagined wasn’t there, of course. I couldn’t talk about what I had done that day, and the cloud still hovered.

  In a larger sense, this became the prevailing pattern in our marriage. Whenever something important needed to be discussed, if there was an event that carried any emotional resonance that needed to be hashed out honestly, we would avoid it.

  Again, it’s important to remember how young we were at the time. We were twenty and twenty-three, kids playing at being adults, following the script: Tony would be the provider and I the homemaker. Even in our emotional makeup, we were following patterns set by our parents. We didn’t share what we felt.

  (Employing a word like share to reveal our feelings wasn’t even in our vocabulary back then.) Painful circumstances were dealt with stoically; the goal was always to overcome rather than to discuss or understand. The solution to any hardship lay in not letting it hurt or damage us—not letting it touch us at all.

  I know this now with the wisdom of hindsight, but I don’t mean to suggest I was trapped for all twenty-six years in a life of existential despair. The fact is, I was happy being a new bride. I was full of high spirits—and I still carried with me the residual glow that came with the security of being married and in love. As we started out, Tony and I were surrounded by friends from boarding school and college days who were also beginning their careers in Manhattan. Most weeknights, with the boundless energy of twentysomethings, we would assemble as a pack at a bar or at an impromptu party at one of our apartments, and on weekends we would visit my parents in New Jersey. It was a fun time, which may have masked the emotional missteps Tony and I were making. It’s also why I see it only in hindsight. Back then, I was distracted by youth and the promise of a perfect life. I believed everything would always work out. Today, I know better.

  A few weeks after purging the JFK gifts, in June 1964, I found out I was pregnant. It was unexpected but happy news for us. Our only concern was our finances. We would need a bigger apartment, with a second bedroom for the baby, and we would need to do all this solely on Tony’s salary. I had just landed my first full-time job with, of all things, the New York State Republican Committee (an indicator of how fully I had suppressed my involvement with JFK’s Democratic administration), and I worried how my pregnancy would play with my new employers. I fully intended to keep working right up to my due date in February 1965—we needed the money—and then devote myself to motherhood. It didn’t work out that way.

  In my seventh month of pregnancy, we were at my parents’ house in New Jersey when I suddenly went into labor in the middle of the night. After being rushed by ambulance to Riverview Hospital in nearby Red Bank, our little boy, Christopher Snowden Fahnestock, was born in an emergency room in the early hours of December 6, 1964, eight weeks prematurely. He died the following day of the same underdeveloped lung syndrome that had taken the life of Patrick Bouvier Kennedy the year before. Even in my grief, I appreciated the coincidence. I don’t know if Tony had similar thoughts, because I never remember us actually talking about the baby, or our loss. The wound was too fresh and painful—and what would be the point? I don’t blame Tony for that.

  I’ve known other couples who’ve lost a baby or young child who also can’t ever bring themselves to mention the subject. But to me, our silence about Christopher was yet another example of how, in our neediest moments, we were unable to comfort each other.

  Everything about that time fills me with sadness now. The worst part may have been the strange hours between the baby’s birth and death. Dr. Small, the obstetrician who delivered Christopher, had told me his life would be very short, a matter of a day or two. Knowing the baby was going to die, he thought it was important for me to see Christopher. He helped me walk down the hallway to the nursery window and pointed out my new son in a back row bassinet behind the healthy full-ter
m babies who were featured in front. I strained to get a glimpse of him, but he was too far away. It is the single saddest moment of my life—that I didn’t get to see Christopher or hold him.

  Neither was I able to say goodbye. I was still recovering in the hospital when my mother and Tony arranged a small graveside service and buried Christopher in our family plot at Fairview Cemetery in Middletown, New Jersey. I still visit the spot, marked by a modest tombstone, always wishing I could have held him just once.

  No mother ever gets over the death of a child. When I look at pictures of me from the weeks immediately after the baby’s death, the contrast with the happy-go-lucky bride of a year earlier is shocking. My face and body are puffy with the added weight of pregnancy. My eyes are lifeless orbs. And the down-turned corners of my mouth made me look like I’d forgotten how to smile.

  As hard as it was, I tried valiantly to pull myself together. I went back to work as soon as I could, trying not to burden people with my problems. And slowly the sadness lifted to where I could appreciate my life again. I had a new apartment with a second bedroom that Tony converted into an office. He was doing well at work—and soon we would be moving to Cambridge, Massachusetts, because he’d decided to pursue his MBA at Harvard Business School.

  It would be a fresh start—something that I badly needed.

  Tony had many virtues, and in Cambridge they came to the fore. He had always done well at school. He was ambitious, smart, conscientious, not afraid of hard work. He also thrived on control—and was never happier than when he was planning a course of action and carrying it through. He devoured his case studies and loved a challenge. It made perfect sense that he would go after an MBA at the premier business school in the country. At Harvard, Tony was in heaven.

  This love of control and order came in handy for him not only in the workplace and at business school but in our family life as well. I recall visiting my parents in New Jersey with Tony about three years into our marriage. They had just sold Still Pond Farm, the house my siblings and I had grown up in, and my father and mother were struggling with decisions about money and where to live.