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THIRTY-NINE

Recently a new mystery was revealed. There is some TV footage of Jack, Jackie, and me making our entrance at a Washington horse show where I end up sitting to Jack’s left; then there is Jackie to my left and an unknown lady behind us. Just visible, back of us, was the memorable hat of Alice Roosevelt Longworth who had been at dinner in what had once been her bedroom. A lady has currently written a book about life at the Kennedy court. I showed her the TV footage. She had questioned my story of the placement at the horse show. Apparently she had “proof” that Alice sat beside the president. I agreed that she should have but she didn’t. The journalist then sent me an archival photograph of the event in which I have been neatly cropped out and replaced by Alice and her hat. Nowadays when we are more used to creative history and fictional presences this seems par for that particular course. But in Palimpsest there is a picture of Jack talking into my right ear at the horse show. This could not have happened unless I were sitting on poor Alice’s lap, a most indecorous thing for me to have done. Later at my birthday party Princess Margaret provided me with extra dialogue in response to “Bye-bye.”

Much of half a century of my English life was present at the birthday party. From the 1940s the novelist John Bowen. From the present day, Evangeline Bruce, wife to our ambassador, and then an ambassadress from long ago, Diana Cooper who spent her honeymoon with Duff Cooper at Villa Cimbrone back of our Ravello house. I have no list of who else was there. Diana Phipps who makes collages^*1 out of pictures cut from newspapers and magazines did a fine memorial of the occasion including friends and foes as well as those present and absent. Clive James, a friend of Diana’s, wrote an amiable poem to celebrate the occasion. Diana Cooper took it away to study at home. When I wrote her a polite note asking for it back she sent it to me along with my note requesting it, an odd bit of one-upmanship. As a child she had known and admired George Meredith, a friend of her mother. When he died she dressed herself in her mother’s mourning clothes complete with thick veil, and attended Meredith’s funeral where she was noticed by all as the mystery lady who sobbed so loudly throughout the service, adding unexpected romance to Meredith’s troubled life.

Jackie had a good—even honest—response to publishers eager for her to write “the story of your life which has been so fascinating to so many people.” “I know it has,” she would say. “At least I know people say so but how can I write about it if I’ve forgotten it all?” But she had not forgotten that after the first bullet was fired at Dallas, Jack had said, “I’ve been hit.” Since he wore a corset for his bad back all she needed to have done was pull him onto the car floor but she reacted too slowly in the shock of the moment. She was also bemused by the piece of his skull which she wanted to put back in place. The rest seems to have been confusion. There was a small group of friends waiting at the airport in Washington. Angie Duke, chief of protocol, reported that her first words to him were, “Get me the plans for the funeral of Abraham Lincoln.” Years later a friend asked her what she considered her greatest achievement. The answer was prompt: “That after all that I had gone through I did not go mad.”