My only education is my heart. I have to work into this in my own way, starting with the day I took him home from the Old French Hospital in New Orleans. I am reciting a life and I need time.

Her hair was bright and strange in the painted glare. The first drops fell. For these final moments at the grave she was still a family. But she knew the minute they moved toward the cars, the Secret Service would separate her from the others. Think of the emptiness of going home alone. Think of not ever seeing the babies again. She was certain there was a campaign of permanent isolation. The funeral director took her arm and murmured something. She shook him off. The family clustered under umbrellas held by their protectors, moving to the cars now, slowly. Marguerite stayed with the diggers. They wanted to fill the hole before the rain got heavy and they worked in earnest, three men pitching dirt methodically. A couple of local policemen came near. The Secret Service came near with those faces made of slate. Still she did not leave. The mistake she'd made was handing over the baby. As long as she held the baby, she was still a family. They'd taken her youngest son and now they were taking the daughter-in-law and the two little girls. Marguerite felt a weakness in her legs. The wind made the canopy snap. She felt hollow in her body and heart. But even as they led her from the grave she heard the name Lee Harvey Oswald spoken by two boys standing fifty feet away, here to grab some clods of souvenir earth. Lee Harvey Oswald. Saying it like a secret they'd keep forever. She saw the first dusty car drive off, just silhouetted heads in windows. She walked with the policemen up to the second car, where the funeral director stood under a black umbrella, holding open the door. Lee Harvey Oswald. No matter what happened, how hard they schemed against her, this was the one thing they could not take away-the true and lasting power of his name. It belonged to her now, and to history.

Author's Note

This is a work of imagination. While drawing from the historical record, I've made no attempt to furnish factual answers to any questions raised by the assassination.

Any novel about a major unresolved event would aspire to fill some of the blank spaces in the known record. To do this, I've altered and embellished reality, extended real people into imagined space and time, invented incidents, dialogues, and characters.

About the author

Don DeLillo published his first short story when he was twenty-three years old. He has since written eleven novels, including White Noise (1985), which won the National Book Award. It was followed by Libra (1988), his novel about the assassination of President Kennedy, and by Mao II (1991), which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Other novels include Americana , End Zone, and Great Jones Street, all available from Penguin.

In 1997 he published the bestselling Underworld. In 1999 he was awarded the Jerusalem Prize, given to a writer whose work expresses the theme of freedom of the individual in society; he was the first American author to receive it. Don DeLillo is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.