Come to the Edge: A Memoir (17 page)

“It’ll be an adventure,” John said when he put me on the train at Penn Station. And it was. He’d fly down on the shuttle; I’d go up on the Metroliner. I sent long letters; he sent postcards of howling dogs with a list of days until we’d meet. He spent his term break in my small apartment on the Hill, studying at the Library of Congress while I was in rehearsal. “I’ve never been faithful this long,” he told me on one of those quiet streets behind the Capitol. And when I had an unexpected five days off during the load-in of the set, he sent me a ticket to meet him in Palm Beach at the house on North Ocean Boulevard that his grandfather had bought in 1933.

The sixteen-room estate, once the Winter White House, was secluded behind high hedges. Designed by Addison Mizner, famous for the Mediterranean Revival style of many of Palm Beach’s grand homes, the house had been christened La Guerida by the previous owners. At the entrance, a pair of espaliered trees hugged the pale stucco wall. A wooden door, Spanish-style and studded, led to a covered walkway through a courtyard to the main house. We rarely used it; John preferred the side door by the kitchen.

Most of the bedrooms were upstairs, but on the first floor the main rooms opened to one another and the sea. There were floor-to-ceiling windows with pinch-pleated draperies, the flowered chintz faded. Outside were tennis courts, a terraced pool, a well-trimmed lawn, and the patio where his father had announced his cabinet in 1961. By the seawall, tall, lean palms swayed, one of them deeply bowed by wind and age. To juggle the visits of so many children and grandchildren, the house was booked in advance through Joseph P. Kennedy Enterprises, the family trust offices in New York.

It was a cavernous place, neglected but clearly loved, and unlike his mother’s homes, it reeked of the past. When I walked through the rooms, it was as if there was music of another time playing. John agreed. Ghosts, he said. Good ones. And on that first trip, we found a wing of the house he’d never been in before. We explored the musty rooms—some draped with sheets, others empty—and he told me that one night many years after Joe Kennedy died, he had the sense that his grandfather was there with him. He smelled the acrid sweet of his pipe. Did I think it was crazy, he asked, to feel the presence of someone after death?

We had spent the first night of our trip at the Breakers. John’s aunt Ethel was scheduled to leave but had asked him for one more day, and he didn’t want to intrude on her time. When we arrived at the house, we were greeted by Nelly, the Irish housekeeper, who inquired where our bags should go. Mrs. Kennedy, she said, was playing tennis. And Mrs. Kennedy was staying in the room near the pool, the one John had requested, the one that had been his father’s. He seemed surprised that she was still there but shrugged it off. Perhaps, Nelly suggested with a knowing sigh, the bags should go to the Ambassador’s room until Mrs. Kennedy departed later in the day. We followed her up the stone staircase, and when she opened the door to the room where his grandfather had slept almost twenty years before, I thought,
The house is still his
.

Later, after we returned from the beach, my suitcase was missing. John found it down the hall in his grandmother’s suite. Nelly confessed that Ethel, on a tear because we were unmarried and sharing a room, had ordered the move. The bags went back and forth a number of times before she gave up. It was clear that she saw women as falling into one of two categories, and with a beady-eyed harrumph, she had cast me as the fallen sort. Perhaps I reminded her of someone? No, John said. She was just like that. He’d seen it with his cousins. Privately, he was incensed, but he opted to steer clear. “She’s difficult, but she’s still my aunt.” One of his mottoes was “Choose your battles,” and this wasn’t one of them. Nor was the fact that Ethel stayed put for the rest of our stay without a word about it to him.

But one morning in the kitchen, when she pointedly refused to speak to me and I left the room in tears, John defended me. His sense of fairness, always acute, was inflamed, and she had crossed a line. This was our time at the house, he said, his voice raised but steady. He wouldn’t ask her to leave, although he could, but if she chose to stay, she would treat me with respect. Like most bullies when confronted, she was speechless, and she retreated red-faced to the tennis courts for the rest of the day.

Afterward, he was shaken but relieved to have spoken up. He smiled when I told him that law school had come in handy. He’d been firm but not rude, and I was proud of him. What I didn’t say was that there was something undeniably sexy about him coming to my rescue.

That summer in Hyannis, it seemed all the cousins knew the story of how John had stood up to Ethel. They knew about the bags and they knew about the rooms. I smiled, somewhat embarrassed, until I realized that nothing was private in his family and everyone had an opinion. It was a rite of passage, his cousin Willie explained. “We’ve all had our run-ins with Ethel.” And what was initiation for me was a badge of courage for John. The cousins admired him, and there were backslaps and high fives. In private his mother especially appreciated the story. She clapped her hands and made us retell it, then divulged one of her own. Even his beloved aunt Eunice, while not condoning the premarital sharing of rooms, weighed in during a morning sail on his uncle’s boat. Her behavior was inexcusable, she said, as we lowered our heads for the boom. And when it came around again, she touched my arm, adding, “You remind me of Jackie, you know.”

…

“Did you always know?” he asked me.

It was our last night in Palm Beach. The casement windows were open wide, and the moon was on our faces. I lay in his arms watching the shadows on the vaulted ceiling.

He asked again. “With other people? Did you know how it would end?”

9½ Weeks
had come out that year, and there was a line about it, about knowing the end at the beginning and waiting for it to happen.

I told him I had. It didn’t keep me from falling; it didn’t keep me from anything. But I had. And when I knew from the start, that made it all the more poignant. Like fighting fate.

Earlier, he’d kicked the sheet off, and now I pulled it close.

“Cold?” he asked.

“No—keep talking.”

He told me the times he knew it wouldn’t work. When and how. The sadness he felt. The difficulty of parting. “But with you, I can’t imagine how it would end. And I don’t want it to.”

“Me neither,” I whispered back. It wasn’t a real lie. But earlier that day, as I had walked alone on the beach, I had sensed something I’d never sensed before. It was the distinct impression that I had two lives and I would have to choose.

As if he knew my thoughts, he began to talk about what he called our lifestyle, choosing each word carefully.

“My career, you mean?” I said wryly. “I miss you so much when I’m away. I wonder, could I give it up?”

“No.” He shook his head. “I don’t want that. That’s not why I’m saying it. It’s part of you.”

I knew there was more, but we listened to the waves.

“Only, sometimes—I’m afraid to open up, afraid you’ll go away, and that when you come back, you won’t speak my language anymore.”

“Never,” I said, my voice quiet and bright because then I knew. “I promise that won’t ever happen.”

He pulled me closer and took my face in his hands.

“I love your hair. I love your neck. I love that other people see how much we love each other. I love when they tell me.”

When we spoke of these things, we were almost shy, as if the feelings might drown us, and at times it was safer for him not to look at me. But not that night. That night he looked in my eyes. That night we spoke of family and marriage, how he never wanted to get divorced and that he believed in what he called his family’s way of family. He wanted that, he said, and it was more important than success. For the first time, I told him, I could see having a child, and in the rain one night, walking home from the theater, I’d imagined a tiny hand in mine. I wasn’t going to tell him; I thought it might make him afraid, but he gathered me in his arms and told me how happy that made him.

What we were talking about then, although we didn’t use the word, was equilibrium, and I wonder now, more than twenty years later, if the house that knew secrets made us speak. That night, for the first time, I thought I could be both a wife and a lover; and I knew what kind of father he would be. And in that room, I saw myself growing old with him.

In April, John accepted a summer internship with the Justice Department. Since our time in Washington would overlap, he suggested that I stay on after the play ended. New York and auditions were only a train ride away, and he missed me. I looked at places. There was a small house I loved on the Hill and an elegant but expensive apartment in a Georgetown row house near his cousin Timmy and his wife, Linda, and their new baby. But Myer Feldman, an adviser in his father’s administration and a family friend, had graciously offered us a vacant duplex condo. It was across the river in Rosslyn, one stop north of Arlington on the Blue Line—a high-rise, the kind where you get lost in the corridors and all the doors look the same. Inside, everything was white and glass—pristine white carpet, white baby grand, and a small balcony that overlooked a highway and the Iwo Jima Memorial.

I pushed against it, but John’s mind was made up. “It’s free!” he argued. But the real enticement, I knew, was behind the building near the parking lot: the Olympic-size pool he’d spotted before we’d even set foot in the apartment.

On my day off in New York at the end of May, weeks before he moved to Washington, I went to a fortune-teller. I had been there before, and she read the numbers and cards with a green-eyed cat sleeping on her lap.

“With this one, you’ve had lives,” she said, glancing up to check my face. “The first was happy, then tragic. He lost you near water, and when you died, he never recovered. The next was a great passion. Forbidden. Undiscovered. Powerful families.”

She’s read her
Romeo and Juliet
, I surmised, trying not to wrinkle my nose.

His Venus. My Sun. A Grand Trine and the Sun/Moon midpoint. Challenge would come later. This summer, she continued, the feelings would deepen, but I would discover things about him I wouldn’t like.

“What things?” I leaned in, the backs of my knees pressed against the frayed fabric of the chair.

“Minor things. Irritations.”

…

On the train back to Washington and a performance that night, I had a red Mead notebook on my lap, and I was thinking about “the things.” Some of his more jocklike friends irked me (if there were too many on a Vineyard weekend, I gravitated toward Caroline and her friends); he didn’t always tell me his plans; he was often late and sometimes messy; and when he lost something, he expected me to find it. But these were slight grievances, and even they had dissipated these past months with the comings and goings and the romance of distance. “I can’t imagine how it would end,” he had said, and I felt that way, too. I was eager for the summer, and yet a part of me wondered whether in living with him, I might lose something.

The week before, he had told me a story. He’d seen a Karmann Ghia on the street with a For Sale sign in the window and bought it on a whim. He called his mother and Marta to say that he had a surprise and would tell them all about it that weekend in New Jersey. When he drove up, proud in his vintage orange sports car, it was his mother who had a surprise for him.

“She … got some things out of the safe.” He looked nervous.

“What things?” I said dimly.

“Her engagement ring.”

His mother, he said, wasn’t surprised. She’d expected it, although it had happened quicker than she thought it would. Since his call, she’d been adjusting herself to the idea. Then he began to laugh. Marta, it seemed, anticipating an engagement party, had bought a $1,300 Ungaro dress that couldn’t be returned. Funny, huh? He laughed again, an elbow in my side.

I opened the notebook. At the top of the page, I had jotted phone numbers, what I’d spent that week, and a line from the play.
Yet swear not, lest you be forsworn again
. I smiled. On the next page, John had drawn a Picasso face for me to find. All unruly lips and eyes. Beside it, a mushy note. “I kiss your faults,” I scribbled with abandon beside the face, the ink staining my fingers. I closed the notebook and pressed it deep into the bag on the seat beside me and settled into the familiar rhythm of the train.

It was the end of his first year of law school. Exams were starting, and I wouldn’t see him for fifteen days. Outside the window, the houses turned to woods, and I waited for the dreamy stretch of green that came somewhere before Baltimore.
Make time count, Don’t count time
, I told myself. But I didn’t. I numbered the days until I would see him again, until we would move into the mammoth white apartment across from the Key Bridge, the one so close to Arlington.

He remembered things about his father, but those recollections came with the uncertainty as to whether they were his own or someone else’s telling enfolded in his memory. Sometimes, if we were lying in the grass, he’d graze a buttercup against my chin to prove I liked butter. “My father did that,” he’d say. Or he’d whisper nothing in my ear—
Pss, Pss, Pss
—until I laughed.
My father did that
. There was his hiding place in the desk; the helicopter’s roar; his father calling him Sam and that making him mad; and nine days before Dallas, the performance of the pipers of the Black Watch on the South Lawn of the White House. The last memory he knew was his: the drums, the marching, and how he’d squirmed off his father’s lap to get closer.

There was a park nearby we’d bike to after work. On the way, we’d pass the entrance at Memorial Drive, but we never went in. That summer, while careful of his reticence, I urged him to go. Some mornings, before the heat was too much, he’d run the trails, past the flags and the military graves—it calmed him, he said—but never to where his father was. We visited his cousins in Georgetown and mine in Maryland. He took me to meet Provi, his mother’s personal maid at the White House and someone whom he considered family. So it felt strange to me to be so close and not to go. It was a visit waiting to happen. But he’d put it off or we’d forget. Something would come up. Until the last day. With the Karmann Ghia gassed up for New York and packed to the hilt, and everything else shipped, we stopped for a moment to say a prayer by the flame on the hillside.