“It was a sign, not just of the times
but of optimism,” the realtor said,
pointing to my soon-to-be-home’s “Nutone”
radio-intercom, its vacuum tubes humming
as I turned the dial, the system original
to the home’s build in 1963, complete
with an atomic symbol of two electrons
swirling an absent nucleus etched
into the wall-mounted, rose-aluminum casing,
my wife, eight months pregnant
with our second child, rubbing her belly
like a crystal ball and surveying
the room’s faux-wood paneling,
the steel hurricane shutters covering
the lone window and sliding glass doors,
my wife, I was certain, not thinking of the race
to the moon but of the starter home
we had outgrown, our clothes
on rolling hanger racks in the hall
where boxes fell from closet shelves
every time someone closed a door
or our daughter, on waking, kicked the sides
of her crib, which is not to say, as new parents,
that we weren’t optimistic, my wife and I committed,
as Kennedy had said in his address at Rice
(my wife and I had watched the video
separately and at different times in different schools),
of his and the country’s desire to pursue
hard things “not because they are easy,
but because they are hard,” the address given
in 1961, thirteen months before Kennedy’s death,
more than a decade before I was born,
my mother and father both seniors in high school
when Kennedy was killed, my mother at Paschal
in Ft. Worth, remembering students skipping
school to hear him speak that final morning
at his presidential breakfast at the Hotel Texas,
over two thousand people attending, one photograph
in my mother’s yearbook showing Kennedy
in his dark suit, seemingly stoic on the hotel steps,
his hands behind his back, chin raised,
eyes toward the horizon and, it would be tempting
to interpret in retrospect, the future,
if not for the other photographs on the page,
one showing him at the podium, the camera
catching him turned and smiling to Jackie,
another showing Jackie at ease,
leaning forward in the convertible
as they depart, Kennedy resting one arm
behind her, the other extended along the top
of the passenger door as if it were the rail
of his wooden speedboat RESTOFUS
in Hyannis Port, the name a play
on TENOFUS, his father Patrick’s boat
and the number of their family at the time,
the fact of the Kennedy family being both like
and not like the “rest of us” not lost
on anyone then or now, which, of course,
was part of their appeal, or at least
their image, the family playing football
on the White House grass, the spreads in Life,
images like Caroline’s pony Macaroni pulling
Caroline and her mother in a sleigh
across the snow-covered lawn, Jackie aware,
always it seemed, of the ephemeral
nature of time, calling a reporter from Life
in the days after her husband’s death to tell
the reporter she had something she wanted
to say to the country, the reporter driving
through a snow squall, the magazine about to go
to press, costing $30,000 an hour to keep it
on hold, though worth it, the editor believed,
Jackie telling the reporter, alone,
that she didn’t want her husband
to be forgotten, didn’t want the person
of her husband to be forgotten, separate
from the recitation of his achievements
or failures, how she had been repeating over
and over in the days since his death
the “one brief shining moment…” line
from the musical Camelot, the record
her husband often played at night,
a point she made certain the reporter
understood, how, though great presidents
would come and go, nothing could remain
the same, a personal point for her beyond politics,
just as she had refused to change her clothes
after the assassination, standing beside LBJ
when he was sworn in on Air Force One,
her husband’s blood still visible on her pink suit,
Jackie saying prior to exiting the plane,
Let them see what they have done, reminiscent,
I cannot help but think, of Mamie Till-Mobley saying,
Let the people see what they did to my boy,
following the murder of her son in 1955,
the March on Washington taking place
eight years to the day after Emmett Till’s murder,
two months after Kennedy introduced
what would become the Civil Rights Act,
President Johnson saying privately
following its passage in 1964 that his party
“may have lost the South for a generation,”
though also saying to the nation, “Until justice
is blind to color…emancipation will be a proclamation
but not a fact,” emphasizing that the struggle
must be an unceasing one, just as Jackie
had instructed to have an eternal flame
installed beside her husband’s grave,
the flame still burning almost sixty years
since Kennedy’s death, almost thirty
since Jackie passed in her sleep in her Manhattan
apartment, “surrounded,” John Kennedy Jr. said,
“by the people and the things that she loved,”
and even now when I cannot sleep,
or I come home late after teaching a class,
my children and wife already in bed,
I find myself, too, checking on those I love,
room by room, the ease of their sleep
filling the house as I test again,
out of habit, the locks on the front
and sliding glass doors, though nothing
has ever threatened us here, the closest
occurrence being on the week we moved in,
a man and his girlfriend abandoning
their car on a nearby boulevard,
fleeing the police after robbing banks
and convenient stores over a two-week span
in neighboring states, the fugitives desperate,
hopping fences, having evaded, momentarily,
the police in pursuit, all of which at the time
I was not aware, patrol cars revving
through the blocks, their lights flashing
as I walked dumbly out into the yard,
just to see, I thought, until a neighbor,
peering out from behind his front door,
silently shooed me back inside,
where I locked the door, learning later
that night from my wife as she refreshed
a newsfeed online that the fugitives
had entered a neighborhood home,
the boyfriend raising a pistol on
the other side of the glass of a patio door,
pointing the barrel at the father
who let them in, and I do not know
if I would have done as the father did
or would have had any other choice,
the parents’ minds flashing, I imagine,
like the lightning that arrived that night,
the percussive rain on their metal roof
as they sat at gunpoint for hours, waiting
and waiting for something to change,
scared, simultaneously, that it would
or would not, their young daughter
asleep upstairs, the parents praying
silently that the storm would not
wake her, that it would muffle
the voices below, and when the fugitives
did leave, fleeing in the family’s car, the family safe behind, the mother
and father perhaps stared through the doorway
into the wind and rain, the taillights
of their car fading as if the house itself
had exhaled the fugitives into the night,
or, more likely, the mother and father
locked the door at once and hurried to call
the police to provide a description
of their own car that, within the hour,
was surrounded, ten miles away
on a dead-end road, the driver-side door
open, behind which the boyfriend
crouched, pinned down and firing
his pistol at the floodlights and squad cars,
the bullhorn voices squawking like birds,
though clearly not birds when the rifles
fired in a thunderclap and smoke
curled in the dark from their muzzles,
then silence, the tap of rain on the roof
of the car, a lone voice again on the bullhorn
when the girlfriend crawled out
from the backseat, her empty hands
shielding her eyes from the lights as officers
rushed in like actors from the wings
and cuffed her on the ground beside
the motionless body of her boyfriend,
even the judge saying later at the girlfriend’s trial,
as reported in the paper, that it was impossible
to know if in that moment the girlfriend
were accomplice or hostage, but what the judge
did have was evidence, surveillance videos
from the robberies of the girlfriend in sunglasses
behind the wheel, and, earlier, stuffing
into plastic bags what money she could
from a cashier’s drawer, facts, the judge said,
that were “irrefutable,” a word, to me,
that conveys something both indisputably true
and beyond discussion, just as every intake
of breath is a drawing inward and every exhalation
is a letting go, a perpetual meditation,
as real as the voices that rise from the Nutone
when I am unable to sleep, the system,
these years later, I cannot bring myself
to remove, even as I search the dial for I know
not what, the reception mostly static
except for preachers imploring their flocks
that man knoweth not his time, or the announcers
calling a ballgame somewhere in the night,
the batter settling in at the plate as the pitcher
shakes off a sign and bears down from the mound,
the moon again full just over his shoulder
and round as the ball let loose from his hand.
______________________________
Don’t Do It—We Love You, My Heart by Jonathan Fink is available via Dzanc.
