November 22 1963

by Braver, Adam

  You’ll never find Jack’s ghost here. Make no mistake: he loved the White House and all it represented. But for him it was his office, the tangible symbol of his ambitions. Both he and Jackie had both always been about the moment. But through her work on refurbishing the White House, Jackie had become part of its history. Nailed into the support beams.

  In the hallway she runs her fingers along the fabric wallpaper. The staff had been kind enough to wait up for her. They’d all been there, looking down as she passed by. No older and no younger than they were two days ago. And for just a moment she had almost believed the shooting was a wicked figment of her imagination, until she glanced up and saw Miss Shaw. Then she just kept on.

  On Valentine’s Day, the year before her husband is shot, Jackie gives a tour of the recently redecorated White House to fifty-six million people. The restoration has been her pride, and what had been touted as sort of a ladylike occupation with furnishing and style turns out to be an executive’s endeavor of fundraising, historical preservation, and curation, no different than what any major museum might undertake. Escorted by CBS correspondent Charles Collingwood, she almost floats between rooms—her pride, schoolgirl giddiness, and whispery teenage voice at odds with the formal postures refined at Miss Porter’s School. But although aesthetics stand as the central theme, it is Jackie’s sense of authority that rings loudest. She becomes more than an effete woman leading her audience on a behindclosed-doors house tour; she becomes its link to history. Even when the president makes a cameo at the end, so quickly reducing her to the expected subservience (her body even appears to shrink), it is still Jackie who talks about the history in detail, while the president delivers eloquent but hollow platitudes about learning from history in order to move forward.

  Just before they enter the Lincoln Room, the live shot cuts away to a prerecorded spot where she tells us, Here is what the White House did to President Lincoln . . . This is how he changed. Slowly she slides us through a series of portraits of Lincoln. 1861 is all she says, and we see a stern but hopeful Lincoln. 1863. 1864. Even rehearsed and filmed in advance, there is shock in her voice when she says, 1865, revealing a chiseled half-smiling Lincoln, somehow looking ten times his age. Just one week before his assassination, she says. Then pauses, almost as though catching her breath.

  She passes by Caroline’s room. Puts a hand on the doorknob. Then continues.

  She’s willing to believe the Lincoln ghost stories. Mr. Pierce says that although he’s never seen the ghost himself, there’ve been more staff sightings than he can count. He’s told Jackie that the circumstance is always the same. A janitor. A butler. Or a maid. They come up to him, looking pale and sick, looking around like a secret’s on their lips, and he always knows what they’re going to report. What they’re going to confide. And do they all report the same thing, Mr. Pierce? she asked. Do they always see the same thing? And he smiled back at her, and told her he always heard the exact same description, from the pinstripe suit to the white spats. She said, The exact same? And he said, The exact same. That made her laugh, and Mr. Pierce laughed too. White spats? she said. They’d laughed together.

  The door to the Lincoln Room is open. And she steps forward, almost assessing the potential. Here is the room where he signed the Emancipation Proclamation. The table with Victorian carvings that holds an original copy of the Gettysburg Address. She’s always loved the room. The light. The magnolia out the window. And as she steps in farther, she can feel the connection tighten. She wants to lie down on the bed. She’d be willing to die there.

  She stares at the carpet patterns and keeps her hands at her sides, fiddling with her fingernails. She can barely see for all her exhaustion, and she’s not sure what comes next. She’d be able to handle a chill from Lincoln flitting off the nape of her neck or blowing against her ankles. But not seeing him. She holds her breath. He could be sitting there, watching her. Sitting in that chair, with his legs crossed and his gaze cast forward. Sensing her defenselessness. If things were to go wrong she could always sneak up on him with that same reckless daring of John Wilkes Booth, draw her thumb and forefinger into a gun, pull an imaginary trigger, and say, Pow.

  The centerpiece of the Lincoln Room is the bed. Measuring six feet by eight feet, the carved rosewood back rises like a lancet arch against the wall. It is both simple and elegant. Bought by Mary Todd Lincoln during her White House restoration, the bed was originally placed in the state guest room. Lincoln never slept in the bed. His eleven-year-old son, Willie Lincoln, did die on its horsehair mattress. And three years later Lincoln was autopsied on a cold table at its foot. It’s hard to imagine Mary Todd Lincoln having any reverence for the bed. It’s a wonder she didn’t take it out back, grab an ax, and chop away at it until it was nothing but splinters and hairs.

  Moving toward the bed, Jackie keeps an eye on the empty chair, looking for the white spats. She really just wants to lie down. Just close her eyes for a little bit. But staying awake means she won’t have to wake up to this tomorrow. That has to be the harder thing, to already have one day behind you, already beginning to form a new history. Better to live forever in one day. That she understands.

  There’d been stories that Jack used the Lincoln bed for some of his affairs. It seems possible enough. Probably true. She had. Kind of. A designer visiting the White House while Jack was away. To discuss the refurbishing. They talked well into the night, sharing a bottle of wine. She’d toured him a little around the White House, talking about the renovations, about the state of literature, but strangely enough never mentioning Jack or the children, nor asking about the source of his wedding band that he kept slightly hidden, often under his right hand. They walked a little closer together. He held doors for her. She laughed at his jokes, which weren’t really that funny. She’d entered a life without history. Every minute was regenerating itself, framed by nostalgic décor.

  The romantic’s belief is that the ideal person already exists somewhere in the world, while the tragedist delights in knowing how rarely they find each other. But here he was. Tall and slightly stooped, leisurely and disheveled despite an attempt at formality, willing to share of himself, but so selectively that she could discern the pattern. And she knew she intimidated him. On the surface this all seemed so impossible. So unlikely.

  Climbing the stairs, she’d looked at the designer and felt overwhelmingly sad. It was not so much the schoolgirl feeling of unrequited love that bothered her, but the fact that the very sequence of decisions that had led her to him was the exact same sequence that would make it impossible to be with him.

  They walked into the Lincoln Room with intimate and cunning banter. After reciting the highlights, she told him to go look at the Gettysburg Address. He walked back to her side and didn’t say anything. Silently, and somewhat surprising to herself, she reached down and held his hand. They made small talk about the history of the room, but she couldn’t think about anything other than how much of herself she had just given over, and that that was enough. Somewhat awkwardly, he dropped her hand, not like he didn’t want to hold it, but in a way that suggested he was afraid. It was late, he said, and he had to get back to his hotel. As they started to leave the room, she took his hand again and said, Please, but then let go. And she said, I’m sorry, and he nodded it was okay, and she said, I hope you don’t think, and he said, No, it’s okay. But what she couldn’t tell him was that she was trying to right every decision she’d ever made in her life with that gesture. And that his touch had the power to undo a life spent trying to give up everything she had, before she’d had it. She wiped her hand along her skirt. Taking his hand had been more daring than anything Jack could have ever done in that room. And so much more damaging.

  She’s not crazy. It’s just crazy behavior. It will probably always be so. It’s just a matter of management.

  She considers whispering President Lincoln’s name. Maybe ask if he doesn’t mind if she lies on the bed. Shares the room. And she wonders what she’d s
ay if he answered. She’d be tempted to ask him, Why? He might be coy and say he doesn’t understand. But she’d work up the nerve and press him a little bit, until he’d finally say, You mean why stay in the room? Haunting the room? And she’d say, Yes, yes, but immediately recant, and explain that she doesn’t want him to answer. Because she knows. Understands. How they’ve both been damaged by God. How both have been counseled by heaven. And how they both have held their own dead children in their arms. Both known that you don’t need to die to be a ghost.

  But she just wants to lie down on the bed. The one he never slept in. In this room. Where the series of events is understood. And where it’s okay to confess that God has been murdered.

  Somehow that seems more daring than dying. Or living.

  CODA: Cleaning Up

  Here’s a final story:

  Vaughn Ferguson didn’t feel like moving that morning. At barely fifty-three years old, he felt as though he’d aged an extra decade overnight. For more than ten years he had been working in conjunction with the White House garage, serving as Ford Motor Company’s liaison to the army’s White House transportation agency. He’d come to the post with close to a quarter century’s experience as a mechanic under his belt, charged with keeping Truman’s Lincoln Cosmopolitan in top order, following the lease agreement between his employer and the Secret Service. Being the man in the middle, Vaughn facilitated a clear line of communication. He took his service seriously, seeing the patriotism in his work, often traveling with the presidents he served, ensuring safe and reliable transportation from a mechanical point of view. And every time he went down to the garage, it felt like an honor to him, still as exciting as the first morning he had entered the official garage at Twenty-second and M. But on November 24, a day that might have been cloudier and colder, Vaughn picked at his wardrobe slowly, trying to find reasons to delay going in.

  He knew Maggie was trying to stay out of his way. Neither had slept the night. This morning she’d offered him breakfast. They both knew he’d refuse. She’d been so teary-eyed each time she looked at him that Vaughn had to look away because he knew if he stared too long, he’d break down; and if he broke down now, he’d never be able to report in today with any degree of professionalism. “You’d better go,” he heard Maggie say.

  Vaughn turned around, still in his blue boxers, holding a pair of gray slacks in his hand. They tilted toward the end of the hanger, bunched up. “I know,” he said. “I know.”

  Maggie said, “You know there’s nothing you could’ve done. You know that, right?” She cinched her robe together.

  It was the first she’d said of it directly, and it was that directness that stopped Vaughn, closing off his thinking just enough to scramble his words. “It’s not that I ever thought—” he began, and then he stopped.

  “Wasn’t anything but a rifle,” she said. Strikingly composed. “Wasn’t anything you could’ve fixed on that car to make a difference.”

  “If I’d been there . . . Maybe the bubbletop.”

  “Was it faulted, the bubbletop?”

  Vaughn shook his head. It had never even left the trunk.

  “There wasn’t anything you could have done. It had nothing to do with the car. You hear me? It had nothing to do with the car.”

  Vaughn looked at her, avoiding her eyes. In twenty-five years of marriage he’d never seen her so sure of something. It was disarming and confirming. Her hands were steady, straight at her sides near her hips, and it didn’t seem to be acting, but pure assuredness. He pulled at the hair on his arm, feeling some shame for causing his wife to have to shoulder the burden. But maybe when it came down to it, Maggie was the one who really carried them. Somewhere along the line they’d just agreed to pretend it was his role.

  “All right now,” Maggie said. “Time to put on those slacks of yours.” She breathed in so deeply he swore he heard her lungs expand. “You’re needed by the White House, Mr. Ferguson. Now if you’ll excuse me . . .”

  He watched Maggie leave the bedroom, then heard the bathroom door shut. Even with her running the hot and cold faucets at full volume, Vaughn could hear her cries. Hard and low, in steady rhythm.

  He pulled his pants on, knotted his tie. He didn’t check himself in the mirror. Moving quickly, he walked past the bathroom. He’d make sure to slam the front door hard. Then Maggie would know it was okay to turn off the faucets.

  It was the red rose petals spread along the rear mouton mat that stunned him. They still held full and colorful. Disconnected from everything, tumbled out of arrangement. And it was strange that anybody would overlook them. Gather evidence, note and catalog everything of importance, yet still leave the petals in the car.

  He’d seen the car the day before at the behest of Special Agent Geis. When Vaughn arrived, he’d stood at the entrance to the White House garage, working up the nerve to go in. A crosstown wind chilled his neck. He wiggled his fingers and then scratched at his thighs. Maybe this was what it was like for people called down to the morgue to identify a body. Delaying and pacing. Making yourself believe that once you go in, the mistake will be clear, and the relief will almost make you laugh in a way that isn’t funny. Yet deep down, once inside, you know exactly what you’ll see.

  Geis wasn’t there, and Vaughn found himself stymied by the agents guarding the car. Their orders gave him access only to the windshield, with a directive to have it replaced and the damaged one processed as evidence. He stood before the limousine, which was covered sloppily by a canvas tarp. He recognized the Lincoln’s contours poking through, especially the curvature of the spare tire. The outlines of the Secret Service’s sideboards edged out along the bottom, and, above, the ribcaged ridges framed the bubbletop. A fraction of the tire was caked with mud, dust, and grease. But more than being dirty, it looked worn. Almost as though there were no tread. He wanted to imagine the limousine complete under there, as pristine as the day he had sent it off to Dallas; almost believing that yanking off the canvas would reveal a car unharmed.

  He lifted the tarp off the hood and over the windshield. A foul odor of chemicals and old meat rushed out at him. He squinted his eyes and bit down on the top of his tongue, nearly drawing blood.

  He had tried to look at the window clinically, knowing he ought to put in a call to the Arlington Glass Company for the replacement. Following along the edges, he avoided the middle, trying not to be hypnotized by the spiderweb cracks that broke out of a single hole near the rearview mirror. What was he supposed to do? No manuals in hand, not even a sense of procedure. He glanced at that little hole near the mirror. Splintered rivers in all directions. He almost gagged.

  “If you saw the car,” he said to Maggie later in the evening. He sat in his lounger, with the television set on. His eyes drifted over it, fixed on a small crack in the plaster. All evening long that box had been droning, a slow dirge. Although it felt like it was beating him down with its constant reminders, Vaughn had not been able to turn it off. He pictured himself staring at the Lincoln, standing in the shadow of the parking lot, the fluorescents washing out his profile. It had seemed infallible to him. “You’ve never done anything but the right thing.” Maggie was running out of things to say. But it wasn’t that her convincing was limited—that much he knew about her; it was that Maggie was finding it difficult to stay positive for her husband. He could hear it in the way she breathed, low and quick, as though the only breath left came from her gut. And he’d felt bad, because all the world was grieving together—through their TV sets and telephones and porch steps and radios and lunchrooms—but Maggie was stuck trying to raise her husband’s spirits, talk him into believing that he wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger. “It might have been worse if you didn’t care for that car the way you did,” she’d said, and as she’d said it they both knew that was about all she had left to say. “If you’d seen the Lincoln,” he had said. “It just makes you wish you could make it right, is all. Just makes you wish you could make it right.” And they had both known
that was all he had left to say.

  When he entered the garage, Vaughn had heard a slow, steady tapping. It wasn’t clear where it came from. He found himself following the rhythmic sound. At times he’d turn the corner, expecting to see the source. Not only would there be nothing there, but the percussion would suddenly seem to originate from the other end of the garage. He felt as though he’d walked three circles around the warren of stalls. Nearing the entrance, he stopped. He started walking again and then suddenly stopped. He drew in a breath, keeping his body so still he thought he might have stopped his heart. There he listened. Listened. The percussive tapping had been from his own feet.

  Vaughn knew the FBI had been combing through the limousine for most of the day before. Along with guidance from the White House physician, FBI investigators had gathered up blood and brain matter (brain matter!), bullet fragments from the cushions, journaled the contents of the car (the lap robes in the back, the contents of the trunk), followed up with detailed photographs to support their notes. Vaughn had not exactly been cleared to go over the car. It was more that nobody seemed to care anymore.