Modern Screen (Jan-Dec 1960)

Getting used to sitting alone for hour ifter hour in strange hotel rooms while ier husband went on with his business. She tried all this, right up until the |ime she became pregnant. He'd just completed an exhausting tour Ivhen suddenly another presented itself. "Would you mind if I left?" Jack asked rackie. ! "No," Jackie said. Was she lying, to herself, to Jack? She didn't know. She didn't know, she told herself. But then, a few days after Jack left — hat moment on the beach — then she tnew. . . . She was at her mother's place in Rhode island. It was late afternoon, foggy, a slight chill in the damp air. She was walkng along the beach, slowly, alone. Suddenly she stopped. She felt the pain, he unbearable pain, in her stomach. She elt the nausea, the terrible feeling of lausea, overtake her. And she felt the ?weat, that came rushing to her face, de;pite the chill in the air. "Oh no," she said, as the pain grew worse. "Oh no." She fell. She knew what was happening. Her oaby, she knew, was dying inside her. "Oh no," she said. "No." She lifted her head. Her eyes began to shift, wildly. She looked straight ahead, at the long litretch of lonely beach. ] She looked to her right, at a silent dune. She looked to her left, at the calm and .'ast expanse of ocean there. "Jack, Jack," she began to whisper. She dug her fingers into the sand. "Jack," she asked, "where are you?" SHE MADE UP HER MIND as she lay n the hospital room that next morning. Tack was flying back, he would be there soon; and, she made up her mind, she would tell him, right as he came through Jie door. "I don't want this any more," she would say, "as soon as your term is up," she svould say, "I want you to leave politics, for good. "Our baby is gone, Jack," she would say. "I'm going to be lonelier now than I sver have been. Don't you keep leaving -ne, too, Jack. Not you, too. Not any more. "Let's be," she would say, "like other people. Let's go away, Jack. Oh, to be able to go away. And breathe real air. And have no more of this, this life, this cloud jwe try to breathe through, to walk on. To go somewhere else where we can hold on ho something. Really hold on to something, i "I heard them before, in the room next door," she would say. "The woman had her baby. Yesterday, a little girl, I think it was. And he came; her husband. I could almost smell the flowers he brought to her. He sat with her all day. All day. He didn't have to leave. And they sat together. They talked, and they laughed. And there was no place else for him to go, to rush to. They just sat together. The wife. The husband. The baby. . . . "Our baby," she would say. "Oh Jack ... I didn't care if it was a boy, or a girl. Did you, Jack? I only wanted a baby. Our little boy or girl. And now — " she would say. "And now. "And now — " She turned her head on her pillow. The door, she could hear, was opening. "Jack?" she asked. "Yes," he said. She looked at him as he walked towards her, slowly, limping on those crutches the way he did. She looked at his face. She had never seen him look so haggard before, so sad, so frightened, so worried. "Jack — " she started to say. "Jackie, are you all right?" he asked. "Jack — " she started again. But she continued looking at him, and she stopped. "No," she thought to herself. "Not now. I won't tell you now. But someday soon. Very soon. . . ." THE DOCTOR, a friend of the Kennedys, wasn't surprised that Jackie looked shocked. He'd had a hunch Jack hadn't told her about the operation yet. He'd thought it time somebody did. "You see," he said, "when your husband was a kid he hurt his back playing that danged touch football they're always playing up there at Hynannis Port. Then in the war — well, you know the story, Jack on the PT boat, the Jap destroyer ramming into the boat, slicing it in half, Jack landing on his back again . . . He's been in bad shape ever since. Now, slowly, things are getting worse. There's a chance, Jackie, that if he doesn't go through with this thing he may end up a hopeless cripple .. . He doesn't want that. He wants anything but that." "And, if he does go through with it?" Jackie asked. The doctor paused for a moment. "Jack's been suffering from an adrenal depletion," he said then. "Adrenalin protects the body from shock and infection. An adrenal insufficiency greatly increases the possibility of infection and hemorrhage during surgery. I've warned Jack that . . . that his chances of surviving the operation are extremely limited." Jackie gasped. She tried to say something. She couldn't. "You've been pretty tense these past couple of months, Jackie," the doctor said. "I know a miscarriage can do it to any woman. . . . But I want you to snap out of it, Jackie. For Jack's sake. That's why I'm telling you what he hasn't told you . . . I want you to cheer him up as much as you can now. He's not saying anything, MODERN SCREEN'S 1960-61 SUPER STAR CHART is available! Be sure to get your copy and learn thousands of fascinating facts about stars of the stage, TV, and Hollywood. Just mail 25 cents in coin with the coupon below. Box 190 Super Star Information Chart Times Square P. O. New York 36, N. Y. Enclosed please find 25 cents in coin. Please rush my copy of MODERN SCREEN'S SUPER STAR INFORMATION CHART Name . . . Address . City Zone. State but the pain, the mental anguish, together they have him going through hell . . . And I want you to relax now, to try to be your old self. For these next few days, at least, Jackie." "Next few days?" she asked. "Today's Monday," the doctor said. He looked over at his calendar. He nodded and circled a date: October 20th, 1954. "The operation's Thursday," he said. That night they talked. JACKIE HAD JUST TOLD JACK about her talk with the doctor that morning. Jack shook his head. "He shouldn't have said anything. It wasn't right. I should have told you," he said. "You would have put it off, till tomorrow, till Wednesday." She took his hand. She tried to smile. "I know you," she said. "I wanted to tell you my way, though," he said. "There were so many things I wanted to tell you . . . my way." "There's nothing to tell me," she said, "except that you're going to have an operation and that everything's going to be all right." "There were other things, though," he said. "What things?" "I wanted to tell you, Jackie . . . first . . . how much I love you." "I know that, silly," she said. "And I wanted to thank you, too." "For what?" "For what you've had to put up with these past couple of years; the way you've put up with everything," he said. "Jack — " "I wanted to tell you what a wonderful wife you've been, a wonderful sport ... I know," he said, "I know that it's been hard on you, Jackie. I know there've been times another girl would have thrown in the towel. But — " She forced herself to laugh a little. "But I've been a real brick about this whole thing, haven't I?" she asked. "Yes," he said, laughing a little, too, "yes. . . . "You know," he said then, after a moment, the laughter gone, "this has been a strange day for me. I tried to work today. But for the first time in a long time I couldn't. I sat at my desk and I started to think. Not about the operation. But I started to think about my brother. About Joe. . . . "Have I ever talked to you much about Joe, Jackie?" he asked. "A little, sometimes," she said. Jack smiled, and he put his head back on his pillow. "He was the oldest of us all," he said. "And he was the best . . . He was handsome, Joe was. And he had brains, and character, and guts . . . And we loved him. Idolized him. Thought him our own private saint, we did. "And he used to say, when he was just a kid, I remember, he used to say that he would grow up someday to be President of the United States. Til settle for nothing less,' he would say. "He meant it, too. If he'd lived, Joe would have gone on in politics, and he would have been elected to the House and to the Senate, like I was. ". . . He never got the chance, though. The war came. He was a Navy pilot. He flew out from England. He finished one tour of duty. He was eligible to come home. But he stayed for a second tour. He wanted to be there for D-Day, he said. "Then, after that second tour, Joe was eligible to come home again. But he heard about an operation, something to do with knocking out the German V-2s. He heard about this the night before he was to leave. His luggage was already on a transport ship, ready to leave for New York.