Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [39]
On Saturday, July 17, a friend called early and woke me. She’d heard about the missing plane on the radio, and didn’t want me to find out that way. As she reported what she knew, I crumpled to the kitchen floor, my back pressed on cabinet knobs. I held the phone against my chest, and when I stopped crying, she spoke. “But it is John. He’s come out of things like this before.”
I remember little of that day, only the heat. The actor’s family shielded me from news reports, steered me from televisions, and tried to keep me busy, their helplessness etched on their kind, embarrassed faces.
I keep searching for a word I once knew, or perhaps imagined. It’s to hold two opposing beliefs at once, fully and without judgment; to know that both are true. Like ambivalence, but without its reticence. That day, when I received my friend’s call, I knew in my heart that he was gone. There would be no rescue. And I also knew that this was not possible. In my mind, I kept seeing the purple shadows of the small, uninhabited islands off Martha’s Vineyard, ones I had been to with him years before. Surely, they would be found there. Surely, they would be rescued. And like everyone else, I waited.
The next morning when the light was still gray, I got up and drove for hours alone on the back roads of Otis, New Marlborough, and Tyringham. I drove fast, careless with myself. As in a dream, lush white fog covered the hills and wrapped itself around the young birch trees. I blinked to see the road. Things forgotten, tucked away and put to bed, tumbled by across the glass as if they were present. A glance, a touch. The way he said my name and woke me in the morning. Spaghetti he made with soy sauce and butter. Leaping on the benches outside the Museum of Natural History. Candles flickering at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which he insisted I see for the first time at night, his hand guiding mine over names of cold stone. Another night—skating over black ice. My back against his chest, his arms holding me up; cold on our faces and the sound of the blades. Black trees, black below, black sky. The brush of blue satin against his tuxedoed leg. And the adventures—dangers that fate had tipped in our favor. Once safe, they became the stories we told. But now, pulled over by the side of a country road, I remembered the terror I had felt.
By eight thirty, the heat was full on, and I stopped at a coffee shop in Lenox. Coffee, I thought. The paper. Do things that are normal.
Outside by the steps, the sun glinted off the newspaper stand. And I saw, on the front page of every national and local paper, the headline, the wedding photograph. I stood for a long time, never making it past the steps. In the thickness of shock, I tried to puzzle out why this was in bold print, why this was news, why this was public. I hadn’t understood until then that it was real. And that he would be mourned deeply by people who had never met him but whose lives he had touched all the same.
Plane debris had begun to wash ashore on Philbin Beach near Gay Head by Saturday afternoon. On Tuesday, at a depth of 116 feet, the fuselage was spotted several miles northwest of Nomans Land, the island you could see from his mother’s beach. News broadcasts began to play the biographical montages mixed with grainy long-lens footage of the house in Hyannis Port, the wide green lawn, and the white tent for the family wedding that had now been canceled. On Wednesday, after the bodies were found, I took the train to New York to attend a memorial service that Friday—not the one filled with dignitaries and family members, with a reception in the Sacred Heart ballroom, but one arranged by his friends Jeff Gradinger and Pat Manocchia and held at La Palestra, an upscale gym he frequented near Café des Artistes.
When I walked in, I felt welcomed, even though I hadn’t seen many of the people in years. Some of his cousins, including Timmy Shriver and Anthony Radziwill, had come directly