November 22 1963

by Braver, Adam

  “How far we could go?”

  “If we just kept flying. How far we’d get.”

  O’Donnell looks confused, as though he wishes he could answer the question for her. Instead he says he’ll ask. That’s all he can do, he says. Just ask.

  “I’m not suggesting we hijack the plane,” she says. “ I only want to know.”

  It is more than the pressure against the airfoil of her wings that keeps a bird in flight. It is the overall design of her body. As though every cell were built and mutated for that very task. There is the contour of her torso. Small and sleek. The carefully placed organs, calibrated in their rhythms for maximum efficiency. Above all there is lightness. Her feathers almost weightless, light but strong, pliable yet tough. And her bones also are very light. Fused together to reduce the need for muscle. But make no mistake. A bird’s bones are solid. Yet constructed in a way to keep her thin and light.

  The engines have been cut, and suddenly everything is still. Although she is alone, and although the door is closed, the scuttle of the political operation goes on just beyond her. Tamping feet under growling orders.

  This truly is their last moment together. It feels vague. Almost without sentiment. Just a fact to note. In minutes they’ll exit out the rear of the plane, into the glare of cameras and newsmen and staff, onto a tarmac that looks oddly vacant, as though it is a stage set artificially lit with not-quite shadows. Everyone there will be unsure of how to look at her, not knowing what should or shouldn’t be said. She’ll only walk alone for a few seconds before Bobby will rush up the stairs of the truck lift to take her hands. He’ll accompany her to Bethesda Naval Hospital and then take her and the body back to the White House. She’ll keep her head bowed, and she’ll say she’s fine, and he’ll say, You don’t have to say anything, and she’ll think she wasn’t planning on it anyway. There will be hordes around her, the Secret Service escort, the Navy Honor Guard, all working with a confused urgency about how to lift the casket down, a few feet off the truck and into the back of the gray hearse. She’ll trail behind until she too has to come off the edge of the truck, and there will be hands on her elbows and wrists. Somehow she will land.

  In her final time alone with the casket, she should say something, bear it significance. But there is nothing to say, and even if there were, she wouldn’t be able to say it. For this moment, this one single moment, she is glad to live in a world without words. Free from symbols and meanings. Without them, anything is possible. Although grounded by her own weight, she can just touch her hand to the casket and still be flying, high above the darkness and the gravity that holds her there. In flight. Watching herself trudge through every wretched minute, as though each one of those minutes were a day in and of itself. Gliding above. Looking down in sympathy and empathy.

  Imagine that. Floating above it all. Heavier than air.

  MRS. KENNEDY IS COMING BACK

  WE PASS EACH OTHER IN WHISPERS. The White House halls are quiet. The kitchens are quiet. The lights are dimmed. We are all quiet, passing each other in whispers. Miss Shaw says she doesn’t think the children should have to see the casket in the East Room, once it finally arrives. “Well how you going to do that?” William asks. “Mrs. Kennedy won’t allow for that.” And Miss Shaw says, “I’m only saying what I think. It’s just my opinion.” She keeps walking. Miss Shaw has the children to attend to.

  We don’t know if she’s even told them yet. We don’t even know how you tell children such a thing. And there isn’t one of us who doesn’t pity Miss Shaw the responsibility, but we all are thankful that it wasn’t us that got the call. It was Wade who’d said he might have quit if he’d been asked. “Charged,” Lucinda said. “Charged. You wouldn’t be asked. You’d be charged.”

  “Well, I don’t know that I could follow through with it, is all I’m saying. Charged or asked.”

  “Then you’d have to go. Insubordination.”

  “I just don’t know how you tell that to a five-year-old girl and a two-year-old boy.”

  “Three,” Lucinda said. “Three years old the boy is, for all practical purposes. He’s got a birthday just days away.”

  Wade said, “Now don’t get mad at me now, Lucinda. I just can’t imagine it. Can’t imagine I could ever handle it. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “Well, it’s a good thing you’re a butler, then.”

  “Now don’t you get mad at me, Lucinda. Don’t get mad at me now.”

  But we’re all a little bit mad now. Upset. Paralyzed. Double-checking things like the weather, the clocks, each other. Making sure that this is real. And, swear to God, if we weren’t seeing each other’s expressions, none of us would believe this was true. That’s when we start getting mad. As if the confirmation is the cause. Not some crazy man across the country. But we can’t get mad at Miss Shaw. She’s doing what none of us ever could. That poor woman must be sick with anticipation. Just waiting. Waiting. We’re all waiting. In a big old empty house. Just waiting. In whispers.

  Someone asks when Mrs. Kennedy is coming back. None of us knows, but William says the ushers are decorating the East Room. He doesn’t say what for. He doesn’t need to. But the word is she’ll be coming home when that’s ready. Wilma says she’s nervous about seeing Mrs. Kennedy. That she’s afraid she’ll lose her composure in front of the first lady, and she’ll be so embarrassed because she knows she’ll have no right to grieve harder than the widow.

  William says, “No offense, Wilma, but it’s not as if she’ll know you. I mean, no offense to all of you if you think she’ll be looking for you. Or even knowing who you are, for that matter.”

  Most of us do take offense at that comment, and we say so. We may not know much about much right now, but we do know that Mrs. Kennedy knows who we are. And Cordenia looks to have especially taken offense to the comment. She’s usually the last among us to start in, but we see her shifting, kicking her feet around. Clearing her throat. Pulling on her sleeves. “That’s not a whole truth,” she says.

  “What’s that, Cordenia? I barely hear you.”

  “I said, that’s not quite a whole truth.”

  “What’s not the truth?”

  “What he said. About Mrs. Kennedy not knowing. She knows. First day I met her she knew. Right here on the second floor. Right outside the president’s bedroom there. Dusting. Mrs. Kennedy walked right up to me and says, ‘I don’t believe I’ve met you before. You’re new?’ And I was so surprised that she’d know me from the rest. I didn’t think people of their kind noticed. But she was good to me. Asked me questions. Talked to me. Called me by name.”

  William says, “That’s because you babysat for the children when Miss Shaw took her days off. That’s different.”

  “But I didn’t at the time.”

  “It’s different, and you know it.”

  Cordenia mutters to herself that it’s not different, and then says out loud, “You’ll see. When Mrs. Kennedy arrives, you’ll see.” She stands there holding her ground, but we can see that every inch of her self wants to be walking away, shrinking away. She’s done proving. Yes, the Kennedys had taken her on their vacations to sit with the children. And, yes, Mrs. Kennedy may have called for her in a way that she didn’t call for the rest of us. But Cordenia is still one of us, and she knows it. At the end of the day, she’s still a maid going home to an apartment that could fit into the White House a hundred times over.

  “You think Miss Shaw has told the children yet?” Wade asks.

  How would we know? None of us has moved since we gathered here. In these quiet halls. And that quiet is what beats on us. But Wade’s just talking. Keeping things moving. Trying to be normal. Because we know when Mrs. Kennedy comes home nothing will be the same. Right now it’s just talk and wonder. But when she comes home, she’ll come home alone. And though Wade keeps on asking things he knows we don’t have the answers for, we just let him keep on. We don’t really want anything concrete right now. We just want to wonder.

  She
’d never say it out loud, but Miss Shaw must wish today had been her day off. She might have been running some personal errands. Stopping off for a pot of tea in Georgetown. A light lunch when she felt her stomach growl. Maybe she would’ve heard the news then. Word rippling through the restaurant. Until it built a force that knocked her from her seat. Surely it would’ve taken an inexorable amount of time to get back to the White House and the children. Cordenia would’ve been there. She’s the one who would’ve had to take the double blow, to look into the children’s eyes as she simultaneously processed the news. Cordenia would’ve been the one. And maybe the traffic would have been heavier than Miss Shaw expected. In the grief and confusion, people would take to the streets. Pour out of restaurants. Shoe stores. Bookstores. Offices. Filling the buses. Flagging the taxis. Stopping up the avenues.

  In that case, then, Cordenia would be the one to get the call from Air Force One, instead, Pam Turnure saying she’s presumed Cordenia’s heard the news, and it would be Cordenia who wouldn’t know what Pam was talking about, forcing Pam to explain what had just happened, and that the first lady needs her service. It would be Cordenia who would swallow, choking back any indication of ambivalence. Holding her breath to keep her stomach down before replying, Of course, and how else can I be of duty to Mrs. Kennedy?

  It would have been Cordenia.

  Instead, Miss Shaw had been sitting in the boy’s room, sewing. Caroline was with a friend in the country, John was napping. Perfect silence. No radio. The hallway was quiet; the staff knew he was sleeping. She sat in her chair, legs crossed, the fabric spread across her lap. Drawing the needle along the seam in a backstitch, two forward and one back. Only the sounds of the thread rolling off the spool and John’s whistling breaths. Barely hearing the footsteps padding down the second-floor hallway. Stopping at the doorway, John’s Secret Service man, Bob Forester, leaned around the corner. She put her finger to her lips. The needle touched just underneath her nose. But he looked insistent, so she started to move her materials off her lap in order to stand and take him into the hallway, where he could say whatever it was he had to say, but still in a whisper, of course. But Bob stepped farther into the room. He said she had a phone call. Before she could protest, looking over at the sleeping boy, Bob said he was ordered to stand guard over the boy until she returned. But she needed to go take the call now. It was a matter of national urgency. And when she picked up the phone, she initially heard strings of static and buzzing. Finally, Pam Turnure’s voice filtered through. “Miss Shaw,” she said, “I presume you’ve heard the news.”

  We don’t like to start things that shouldn’t be started, but sometimes William does. It’s his nature. Because William’s skin is so light, he believes that some of the people talk to him a little more than they do to the others. It was reinforced for him downstairs, when an usher told him that Mrs. Kennedy was not coming back until the early hours of morning. She had decided to go to the naval hospital in Bethesda and wait there until they were ready to bring the president home. William heard this downstairs, right before he passed by the East Room. He’d been down there to verify some instructions from Mr. West about which rooms to prepare for the Kennedy family members who were on their way to Washington. That’s when he started talking with the usher.

  See. I told you so. They just talk at me because they think I’m white. We tried to tell William that had nothing to do with it. Especially today. People around here are so tensed up inside that they’ll talk with anybody just to let a little of it out. He didn’t buy that. Still, he learned that Mrs. Kennedy is keeping control over everything, despite being in such a bad way. Every effort being done is according to her planning. Right now, the main focus is in preparing the East Room for President Kennedy, but William tells us that we’d better be prepared to host more than just the Kennedy family. Visitors are going to be coming from all over the world.

  We nod.

  Did you hear me? he asks.

  We do. But we want to know what the East Room is looking like. What they’re doing to it.

  William pauses, says he only saw it briefly. It’s not that he didn’t want to stare, but he was afraid to. A whole crew was moving things and sweeping and hanging black bunting and working so efficiently. But they were like ghost cleaners, William says. Like he could see right through them. And their feet didn’t make a sound. Imagine. In that big empty room with the hardwood floors. Not so much as an echo. But most striking was the big stand in the middle that he figured was there to hold the casket. William says it must be eight feet long, all draped in black. When he looked at it, he saw the portrait of George Washington with a hand outstretched, as though pointing right at the stand. He knows it sounds stupid to say, but he really did pinch himself to see if he was dreaming. He’s got a small mark on his forearm to prove it. He couldn’t look into the East Room but for a minute, because he says it had started to make him feel ghostly, himself, and he says he broke out into as much of a run as one could have done politely, not stopping until he found us.

  Miss Shaw is at the end of the hall. Moving slowly. She stops briefly and looks back at us, over her shoulder. We look at her sympathetically. We know that loyalty and courage don’t always mix.

  “Maybe Mrs. Kennedy will be home in time,” Wilma says. It’s a doubtful whisper. “She probably wants to be with her children, anyways.”

  “I told you,” William says, “she won’t be back until early morning.”

  “What do they do at the hospital that takes so long?”

  William shrugs. “I don’t know. I suppose they’re getting his body ready for the casket. Maybe doing an autopsy for the record? Signing on the death certificate.”

  His matter-of-fact tone stuns William more than us. He tries to backtrack a little, saying that he really doesn’t know, it was just based on what he’d seen in movies. And that’s the thing: it is like a movie, only one that we’re inside of. It’s as though we see the sets and the artifice surrounding us, but are caught in its drama. We don’t know what to believe. Or expect. Some of us are still fully convinced that President and Mrs. Kennedy will walk right up these stairs, looking as inspired as the day they left, just a little bit wearied from the travel.

  Cordenia likes to tell this story, about when she first met President Kennedy. She was babysitting John for the first time, and he was crying like nothing, finding himself with this strange person. Cordenia’s looking all around for something to entertain the boy, to distract him. And she finds a jack-in-the-box that plays “Pop Goes the Weasel,” and, of course, the clown jumps out on the last note. That hushes little John up, so she plays it again. Winding it up again and again. And when she tries to take a break, the boy looks at her, looks at the box, and says, More. Cordenia is sprawled out on the floor, barely half turned to the doorway, when the president comes in, and, as honest as sunshine, she has no idea who he is. Even when he starts singing the ending of “Pop Goes the Weasel,” just before the clown pops up. The boy is so taken by the clown that he hardly notices his father. The president says hello to Cordenia, and she says hello without turning around, a little tentatively, already feeling a sense of protection over John. She can feel the president standing firm. Still looming. Who are you? he asks. Are you new? She replies simply, Yes, I am new. She’s keeping her attention on the boy, who is gesturing to the jack-in-the-box for more. Did we hire you or did the White House hire you? She thinks she may have sounded a little snippy when she replied that she was afraid the White House hired her. As she ends the sentence, her mind stops on how he said the word we. She’d just finished winding up the toy, and the music has started, and John is clapping his hands. The way the president said we made it all clear, and Cordenia says it was like she was seeing the room as a photograph—sprawled out across the floor, with President Kennedy standing over her, watching her body trying to recompose itself.

  Miss Shaw must know it would be cruel of her to tell the children before dinner. They’ll need their strength. But it w
ill be impossible to look at them eating as though everything is normal. Caroline will talk about her day. John will fly his hand around like an imaginary helicopter, saying, “La-pa-ca. La-pa-ca.” While normally she would instruct him on manners, tell him to focus on his meal, tonight Miss Shaw will allow him to play. Be unusually lenient. Hope he doesn’t notice; hope that neither asks when their parents are coming home.

  William says he hates to think like this, “But do you think we’ll still have jobs after today?”

  Wade says, “They still have to run the White House, don’t they?”

  “But Mr. and Mrs. Johnson are likely gonna be having their own ideas in mind,” William says. “Their own ways of how they’ll be wanting things run.”

  “Even so, that doesn’t mean they have to hire a new staff.”

  “Maybe yes,” William says. “Maybe no.”

  We bring up how inappropriate it is to be having this discussion. Knowing Mrs. Kennedy is sitting all alone at the hospital, losing her husband the way she did, probably feeling like she’s lost everything. We think it best to go about making a comfortable setting for her, once she returns. Putting our focus there. Not thinking about ourselves. Not concerning our thoughts with how we might be affected.

  William looks a little flustered. In our hearts we can forgive him, given today’s tension. But it’s not so easy with our nerves on end. He says he agrees with what we’re saying, and that he’s insulted we’d find him insensitive. “Still,” he says, “I’ve got a family too. I don’t know how these Johnsons are. I don’t know what they will or will not be wanting. I mean, do you? Any of you?”

  Cordenia starts to raise her hand, holding it tight to her chest, not much above her shoulder. “I met Mr. Johnson once,” she says. Cordenia pauses. Looks down to the ground. Her voice is low, barely audible. But she seems taken aback by it. She doesn’t notice us looking at her. Waiting.