In the morning, early, he was gone. She found money in little bunches on top of the bureau and she counted it up, amazed. One hundred and seventy dollars. She was sure it was everything he had.
Three times he'd asked her to live with him in Dallas. Three times she'd said no. She stood by the bureau thinking. It was a well-known pattern, things that happen in threes. There was a certain dark power to the number three. She'd noticed all her life how it meant bad luck.
22 November
At the airport they were standing on baggage carts and clinging to light posts. They were draped over the chain-link fence, people in raincoats, waving flags, hanging off the sign for Gate 28. Skies were clear now and the 707 swung massively to a stop on the tarmac. They came running from their cars. They stood at the edge of the crowd, jumping up and down. Children rode the shoulders of gangly men. There was a mood rising from the packed bodies, an eager spirit of assent. Members of the welcoming party edged into place at the foot of the ramp, fussing with their clothes and hair. The aft door opened and the First Lady appeared in a glow of rosebud pink, suit and hat to match, followed by the President. A sound, an awe worked through the crowd, a recognition, ringing in the air. People called out together, faces caught in some stage of surprise resembling dazzled pain. "Here" or "Jack" or "Look." The President fingered his lapel, gave a little jacket-adjusting shrug and walked down the ramp. The sound was a small roar now, a wonder. They shook the fence. They came running from the terminal building, handbags arc! cameras bouncing. There were cameras everywhere, held aloft, a rustling of bladed shutters, with homemade signs poking through the mass.
Welcome Jack and Jackie to Big D.
After the handshakes and salutes, Jack Kennedy walked away from his security, sidestepping puddles, and went to the fence. He reached a hand into the ranks and they surged forward, looking at each other to match reactions. He moved along the fence, handsome and tanned, smiling famously into the wall of open mouths. He looked like himself, like photographs, a helmsman squinting in the sea-glare, white teeth shining. There was only a trace of the cortisone bloat that sometimes affected his face-cortisone for his Addison's disease, a back brace for his degenerating discs. They came over the fence, surrounding him, so many people and hands. The white smile brightened. He wanted everyone to know he was not afraid.
The Lincoln was deep blue, an iridescent peacock gleam, with an American flag and a presidential standard attached to the front fenders. Two Secret Service men in front, Governor Connally and his wife in the jumpseats, the Kennedys in the rear. The Lincoln moved out behind an unmarked pilot car and five motorcycles manned by white-helmeted city cops showing traditional blank faces. Stretching half a mile behind came the miscellaneous train of rented convertibles, station wagons, touring sedans, Secret Service follow-up cars, communications cars, buses, motorcycles, spare Chevys, Lyndon, Lady Bird, congressmen, aides, wives, men with Nikons, Rolliflexes, newsreel cameras, radiophones, automatic rifles, shotguns, service revolvers and the codes for launching a nuclear strike.
The Lincoln seemed to glow. Sunlight flashed from the fenders and hood, made the upholstery shine. The Governor waved his tan Stetson and the flags snapped and the First Lady held roses in the crook of her arm. The burnished surface of the car mirrored scenes along the road. Not that there was much to collect in the landscape at hand. Airport isolation. Horizontal buildings with graveled rooftops. Billboards showing sizzling steaks. Random spectators, brave-looking, waving, in these mournful spaces. And a man standing alone at the side of the road holding up a copy of the Morning News opened to the page that had everybody talking. Welcome Mr. Kennedy to Dallas. An ad placed by a group called the American Fact-Finding Committee. Grievances, accusations, jingo fantasia- not so remarkable, really, even in a major newspaper, except that the text was bordered in black. Nicely ominous. Jack Kennedy had seen the ad earlier and now, with towered downtown Dallas in the visible distance, he turned and said softly to Jacqueline, "We're heading into nut country now."
Still, it was important to be seen in an open car without a bubbletop, without agents on the running boards. Here he was among them in a time of deep division, the country pulled two ways, each army raging and Jack having hold of both. Were there forebodings? For weeks he'd carried a scrap of paper with scribbled lines of some bloody Shakespearean ruin. They whirl asunder and dismember me. Still, it was important for the car to move very slowly, give the crowds a chance to see him. Maximum exposure as the admen say, and who wants a president with a pigeon's heart?
And there were friendly crowds ahead. The strays on the outskirts, stick figures, gave way to larger groups, to gatherings. They appeared at intersections. They stood on bumpers in stalled traffic and cried, "Jack-eeee." Signs, flags, surging numbers, people fifteen deep, crowds growing out over the curbstone, craning for a look at the brilliant limousine. The cops astride their Harleys trimmed the ragged edges. There were people backed against building walls who could not see the limousine but only figures gliding by, spirits of the bright air, dreamlike and serene. The crush was massive down near Harwood. It was a multitude, a storm force. The motorcycles rumbled constantly, an excitement in the sound, a power, and the President waved and smiled and whispered, "Thank you."
Advise keep crowds behind barricades. They are getting in the street here.
Street by street the crowd began to understand why it was here. The message jumped the open space from one press of bodies to the next. A contagion had brought them here, some mystery of common impulse, hundreds of thousands come from so many histories and systems of being, come from some experience of the night before, a convergence of dreams, to stand together shouting as the Lincoln passed. They were here to be an event, a consciousness, to astonish the old creedbound fears, the stark and wary faith of the city of get-rich-quick. Big D rising out of caution and suspicion to produce the roar of a sand column twisting. They were here to surround the brittle body of one man and claim his smile, receive some token of the bounty of his soul.
Advise approaching Main go real slow speed.
Into the noontide fires. Twelve city blocks down Main Street, some embers of the melodrama of small towns, of Hallmark and Walgreen and Thorn McAn, scattered among the bank towers. The motorcycles came, a steady throttling growl, a tension that bit into the edge of every awareness. The sight of the Lincoln sent a thrill along the street. One roar devoured another. There were bodies jutting from windows, daredevil kids bolting into the open. They're here. It's them. They're real. It wasn't only Jack and Jackie who were riding in a fire of excitement. The crowd brought itself into heat and light. A knowledge charged the air, a self-awareness. Here was a new city, an idea that traveled at the speed of sound, pounding over the old hushed heart, a city of voices roaring. Loud and hot and throbbing. The crowd kept pushing past the ropes and barricades. Motorcycles drove a wedge and agents dropped off the running boards of the follow-up car to jog alongside the Lincoln. Was it frightening to sit in the midst of all this? Did Jack think this fervor was close to a violence? They were so damn close, nearly upon him. He looked at them and whispered, "Thank you."
The men in dark glasses were back on the running boards as the motorcade began its swing into Houston Street and the last little dip before the freeway.