The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [246]
Jack left the hospital on October 1 and flew to Hyannis Port. During his weeks in the hospital, Bobby, George Smathers, and Governor Foster Furcolo of Massachusetts had given speeches in his stead, but now Jack was about to fly to Canada to give a talk. He was so weak that he canceled a dinner that Lord Beaverbrook was planning for him on the trip so that he could rest.
Dr. Travell had the impression that Jack was “discouraged.” Joe and Rose had brought Jack up never to be depressed, or if he was feeling low, never to admit it, not to himself, and certainly not to the world. It was a measure of how down he felt that he could admit that he was feeling downcast.
“You know, what you need is a real good hot-tub bath,” Dr. Travell said. It was hardly a suggestion that seemed likely to bring on a dramatic change.
“You know, I haven’t been in the bathtub since I entered New York Hospital because of the wound in my back,” Jack said, looking at the doctor. “I can’t go on with another great big gaping hole.”
The words had a slight tinge of self-pity, an emotion unknown to Jack. “You don’t have a great big gaping hole in your back, and there’s no reason why you couldn’t get right into a hot tub and soak,” the doctor said as Jack stared at her in disbelief. “You haven’t seen what is there. It’s been covered by the dressing. You’ve got a dressing on it.”
Jack took his bath, and Dr. Travell believed that it was “a cake of soap that saved the day and a hot tub bath.” But when Jack left to fly to Canada, he took the same scarred and aching body with him, and his health was hardly demonstrably improved.
Jackie had an impeccable sense of how to memorialize special occasions. On their fourth wedding anniversary in 1957, she prepared an illustrated book titled “How the Kennedys Spoil Wedding Anniversaries.” The sketches were wondrously whimsical, but as always with Jackie, there was a subtle edge to her humor. The first drawing in the exquisite book portrays Jack lying in bed with the diligent Jackie at his side. In the second drawing the couple has changed places, and Jackie is in bed, while Jack watches over her. The pictures made light of an unpalatable truth. If they disclosed a hidden irony in Jack’s young wife, the gift also suggested that this was a woman who cared enough for her husband to sketch these gentle scenes of their marriage.
There were persistent rumors that Joe had headed off a divorce by promising Jackie a million dollars if she would stay with her husband. There is no evidence that any such offer was made, and it hardly would have been enough of a payoff to keep a despondent Jackie in a dreary marriage. If her fidelity to her marriage was indeed purchased, she was the consummate actor, not only keeping the Kennedy name but also displaying interest in her husband’s career.
“I was alone almost every weekend while Jack traveled the country making speeches,” she recalled. “It was all wrong.” Jackie had an intense inner life that even Jack did not fully know. She was a woman not simply of mood swings but of dramatic changes in her perceptions of the world around her.
One day she would flirt with Jack with those gaminelike eyes, as her mother recalled, “writing him little jingles and poems and bringing him little presents with appropriate rhymes accompanying them.” Then the next time she saw him, she would be so coldly uncaring that Chuck Spalding believed that her feelings toward her husband had gone from love to hate.
Only Jackie truly knew what she felt toward her distant, philandering husband, and this deeply private woman was not about to unburden her soul in the authorized