Part 7 (1/2)

I'd been to the Cape house twice before, but on that night, everything looked different. The Compound, as the press and locals called it, was really a cl.u.s.ter of three houses, the largest bought by Joseph P. Kennedy in 1929 and the two adjacent ”cottages” acquired later by John's father and his uncle Bobby. The Shriver family had a house nearby. There was a large pool and tennis courts, and at the main house, a circular drive and a towering flagpole. As we approached Irving Avenue and the sea, there were detours and barricades, along with a smattering of onlookers milling about on the road-the next day at the church there would be thousands. It was still foggy, and the streetlamps cast an eerie light. Suddenly, the cars ahead came to a dead stop, and police began directing vehicles without clearance to turn back. As an officer approached, I rolled down the window.

”I'm a friend of John's.”

”I'm sorry, miss, but we can't let you through.”

”Could you at least call the house? They're expecting me.”

”I'm sorry, miss. We can't disturb the family. You'll have to move along.”

The driver grew impatient and began swerving up a driveway to turn around. ”I'm dropping you at a pay phone in town, lady.”

”Wait!” I implored. There was a screech of tires, and the driver threw me a look.

Just then, through the haze, John appeared, barefoot and s.h.i.+rtless, an orange sarong tied low at his waist.

”It's all right, Officer, she's with me.”

The policeman's gruff demeanor dropped at once. ”Mr. Kennedy, I had no idea. Our orders were to-”

”No harm done,” John said, exchanging enough small talk to put the man at ease.

He took a bag in each hand, and I carried the dress, safe in its plastic sheath, and the wide-brimmed black hat I planned to wear the next day. ”Nice,” he said. ”Going down the Nile, are we?” Then he led me past the small crowd at Scudder and Irving, through a high hedge, and down the walkway to the back door of his father's house.

Before we went in, he pulled me from the porch light and held me tight. ”Where've you been? I missed you.” He smelled of sun and Eau Sauvage.

I expected everyone to be asleep, but they were all gathered around the kitchen table, laughing. In keeping with tradition, Ed was about to leave to spend the night at a house nearby. Maurice was staying elsewhere, too. Caroline smiled. She was tanned and relaxed, more serene than I could ever imagine being. She greeted me warmly, and his mother turned and rose from the table.

”We're so glad you're here! You poor thing, you've come so far.”

”It's been an adventure.”

”Well, you're here now. Are you hungry? Marta, Efigenio, heat up some of those lovely leftovers from the rehearsal dinner.”

I sat down at the table, and as Marta fussed over a plate, John began teasing his sister-one last grand ribbing before she was a married lady. He kept trying to get a rise, but each time she bested him. Even he couldn't faze her.

His mother always seemed beguilingly girlish to me, and that night even more so. She spoke excitedly of preparations, of how well the rehearsal had gone, how delightful the dinner had been, and who would be in what car on the way to Our Lady of Victory Church in Centerville the next morning. Then her face brightened.

”Oh, John,” she said, as if it were Christmas morning, ”show Christina the tent!”

And so, close to midnight, we made our way through dark hedges and down the dip in the hill by the main house-John's grandmother's house-which stood watch over Nantucket Sound. As if she couldn't help herself, she followed us through the wet gra.s.s to the lawn, where a huge white tent stood billowing. It was lit up and filled with people. And when we reached the entrance, she walked in ahead.

There were actually two tents, she explained, one for c.o.c.ktails and the receiving line, and a bigger one for dancing and the seated dinner. In the main tent, waiters from Glorious Food moved by us with the swift grace of dancers as they set up the large round tables and the white wooden folding chairs. Florists from New York were hanging lanterns and filling buckets and grapevine baskets with the simple summer flowers she loved.

She introduced us to the man in charge and lavished compliments on the staff. John hung back, wandering at the edges; he'd seen it earlier. She stood at the center of the tent under the highest peak, a bower of blossoms suspended above her, and surveyed the world of her making. She stretched out her arms. ”Isn't it wonderful?” she said, her face glowing.

And it was, to see the magic before the magic, the event before the event. I watched her then and thought, This is a woman who does not take life for granted. This is a woman who knows her luck and lives it, who grasps that beauty is transformative and transient This is a woman who does not take life for granted. This is a woman who knows her luck and lives it, who grasps that beauty is transformative and transient. Even in a wedding tent.

The next day, there was football in the morning and a laughing bride. Tears at the church and cheering from the crowd. There were champagne toasts and dancing. After the receiving line and before the dinner, the wedding party gathered near the dunes in the russet afternoon light, and pictures were taken: the bridesmaids in easy elegance, their hair wreathed and their silk dresses fluttering; the groomsmen with blue bachelor's b.u.t.tons in the lapels of their periwinkle jackets. All wore breezy smiles. And when a wind came off the water, Caroline's veil got tangled behind her.

The guests stood on the lawn and watched from a distance, the women holding on to their hats and smiling. The clink of gla.s.ses. High above, in front of Rose Kennedy's wraparound porch, the flag that was lowered for tragedies whipped about, furiously dancing over the old lions of the Kennedy administration and Manhattan's literary and media elite. Later in the main tent, John and his uncle Teddy gave their toasts, Carly Simon sang, and the mother of the bride danced in her pistachio dress, a gloved hand on her son's shoulder. George Plimpton's antic.i.p.ated fireworks were applauded but impotent, done in by a bank of fog. As the night went on, the traditional standards s.h.i.+fted to the bluesy funk of an R & B band, replete with a horn section and Marc Cohn on vocals.

I was seated at a table diagonally across the dance floor from the wedding party. It was lodged in a corner near an opening in the tent and came to be known that night as the ”John's friends' table.” Kissy was there, along with Rob and his girlfriend Frannie, and Billy Noonan, a wag from Boston who told salty jokes most of the night, his eyes narrowed and needful of your response.

To my right was Jeffrey Ledbetter. He was seeing John's cousin Kerry but wasn't seated with her either. I knew him but not well. He'd also gone to Brown, and there had been no missing him on campus. Heads above anyone else, he was always bounding somewhere, with his Irish setter at his side. Radiant and fearless, he wore his hair long, and I saw him as a kind of Daniel Boone, rallying others over the mountain. He was from Arkansas, from a politically active family, and he let you know about both right away. John had visited him in Little Rock, and there had been some famous camping fiasco in the Ozarks, each of them telling the tale with a different twist. ”Our boy did well,” Jeffrey whispered after John gave his toast. He told me he was glad I was with John, glad I made his friend happy, and we talked of love that night.

Months after the wedding, Jeffrey would die of an aneurysm. When John found out, he wept through the night, inconsolable. He had lost a close friend, one who was so young, but I knew that it was more. ”We were simpatico, you know,” he said, as I held him, the boy whom death had touched many times, who made friends easily, and for whom life, in some ways, opened like a parting sea, but for whom intimacy and trust were rare. He'd had that with Jeffrey. When he returned from the memorial service, his grief had settled, and he spoke philosophically. Jeffrey had died in the middle of a s...o...b..ll fight. There was poetry in that, right? And the autopsy had revealed a congenital heart defect that, if known, would have meant an entirely different life for him-a life that his twin/friend sensed would not have matched his spirit.

The wedding was studded with beautiful women. On the other side of the tent, before the toasts, as John busied himself with best man duties, I saw him laughing with an attractive bridesmaid he'd once had a dalliance with. He'd told me about it, and although he'd brushed it aside and said it was nothing to be jealous of, I was. I remember because it was the first time I had felt that with him-not the seething sort, but an opening, a soft sinking recognition of how deeply I'd fallen, how much I adored him, and how well I could be hurt.

John sent his cousins by the table to check up on me and make sure I was amused. Willie Smith was courtly, with sad eyes, and he delivered messages in a m.u.f.fled voice. Timmy Shriver took it upon himself to relay all the weaknesses of his younger cousin's character and each and every childhood failing. John was skinny, he wasn't a good athlete, he dressed like a sissy. ”Why are you with this guy?” he prodded. I noted the code of the beloved cousins: The more you love, the more you tease. The band had begun ”Our Love Is Here to Stay,” and like a white knight, Anthony Radziwill interrupted Timmy's spiel and asked me to dance.

Anthony, son of Jackie's sister, Lee, had grown up in England and looked proper in his groomsman's jacket. Through his father, Stanislas Radziwill, he was a Polish prince, although the t.i.tle was now a courtesy and he never used it. Of all the cousins, he ribbed John with the greatest elan and the most pleasure. He was less aggressive than some of the other cousins, but his words had a certain spur. In the middle of the Gershwin tune, John appeared on the dance floor and tapped Anthony on the shoulder, asking to cut in. Anthony ignored him and, grinning, spun me repeatedly out of reach as the song continued. Not for a year / But ever and a day Not for a year / But ever and a day. John followed, darting around us. ”Cutting in, Anthony...I said, cutting!”

I laughed as they tussled. Finally, he elbowed Anthony out. ”Sorry, Prince, find your own girl. I'm stealing her away.”

His hand was warm on my back. ”Where've you been all this time?” he whispered in my hair, and told me I looked pretty. Then he made me repeat everything the cousins had said about him. ”Jerks!” he bellowed, but I thought he seemed quite pleased.

I loved dancing with him to the old songs. He did well with the box step, and I coached him on the fox-trot and Lindy. Like any private school boy, he knew the steps and could dip and spin with the best of them, but he didn't like to lead. It wasn't his forte. He was better doing his own thing, solo but connected, and so was I.

When it grew dark, after dinner and the cake and the fireworks, he found me again. The second band had come on. His pink tie was loosened, the jacket was off, and his s.h.i.+rtsleeves rolled. He pulled me onto the dance floor, and soon I kicked my sandals into the wet gra.s.s.

On the night before the wedding, after we returned from the late-night tour of the tent, Mrs. Ona.s.sis showed me to the room where I would stay. It was small, near the top of the stairs, with sewing supplies and an ironing board ready for morning. As she held the door open, she said she hoped I wouldn't mind, the guest rooms were full. My bags were already there, placed neatly inside the door by Marta. In the back of the room, suspended from the eaves, was Caroline's wedding dress, low-waisted with a shamrock applique and a twenty-foot train stretched out in sweeping dips.

”Oh,” I gasped. The dress was stunning.

Mrs. Ona.s.sis smiled, watching. ”Well...good night.” She stood there a moment before she closed the door, her voice a caress that lingered.

Maybe, I thought as I undressed, the bridal custom extended to all the women in the house, that we all must sleep alone the night before a wedding. Maybe, like Aphrodite, purity could be renewed by ritual. As much as I wanted to sneak across the floorboards to my man in the sarong across the way, I didn't dare. Not that night. She had shown me to the room.

I sat on the edge of the single bed. The dress hung in front of the small window, backlit by a streetlamp on Irving. When I was little, I hadn't always played at being a bride-it was more harems and intrigue, more ballerinas and Indian princesses, torch singers and Mata Hari. But that night was different. Under a thin coverlet, I tried to sleep, but the dress, consuming and fragile, moved in and out of my dreams, like a beautiful ghost.

In the years that I was with him, and the many nights I was a guest in his mother's homes, this was the only time I was shown to a separate bedroom. I asked him once if his mother was all right with us sleeping together under her roof. I knew there were rules to be followed with her, and I didn't want to misstep, but he a.s.sured me that this was not one of them. His girlfriends had always stayed over. ”She's cool with it,” he said with a measure of pride. ”Since high school.” I thought of my parents and the byzantine double standards of those years that never seemed to include my brothers. Even at the age of twenty-six, having a boyfriend sleep over was an iffy prospect. ”No, she's not like that. Not at all.” His mother had a theory, he went on, that his grandmother Rose's att.i.tude toward s.e.x had created problems for his father, and she didn't want that for him. I didn't ask about the problems. I nodded.

The day after the wedding, before I left to begin the trip back to Connecticut and the long push of rehearsals before opening, John took me to meet his grandmother. She would be ninety-six that Tuesday. Two years before, she'd suffered a major stroke and couldn't attend the wedding ceremony, but after morning Ma.s.s in her living room, the house was alive with children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, who'd gathered to say h.e.l.lo.

Two of the Lawford girls stepped aside, and it was our turn.

”Happy Birthday, Grandma. It's me, John.” She didn't speak and kept nodding her head.

”It's John, Grandma.”

The nurse told him to speak louder.

”There's someone I want you to meet.”

I knelt down by her wheelchair. She was so frail, so small, it surprised me. And I remember pink all around her. A dress, a blanket maybe. Her hair was done just so, and she wore lipstick. The desire to look pretty had not left her. I took one of her soft blue-veined hands, and she smiled. Her grasp was strong. John held her other hand. He spoke about me, how we had met and the play I was doing, and that he would start law school in the fall. With a gleam in her clouded eyes, she motioned as if she wanted to tell him something. He leaned in. ”Why, yes, Grandma,” he said with a wary smile. ”You're right-that's true.”