Read Jack's Widow for Free Online Page B

larger house, long drive, bigger grounds, less chance of any nutcase being able to join in with the tourists just a few feet away from your front door.
    “Or go far away. You love Europe, you speak French and Spanish.”
    There was a momentary lull while they both stopped to think.
    “But then,” he continued, “Europe is a problem. The local police will want to help…and…different countries will have their agenda and maybe try and use you.” He raised his hands in despair.
    “Not to say they couldn’t guard you well.”
    There was a small silence in the room as they heard yet another tourist bus, with its attendant loudspeaker, drift slowly by.
    “No, I don’t think I should leave America. There’s the children’s education and my mother, and the Kennedys.” She grimaced in a friendly way.
    “Okay, then there is L.A. Big houses, big security are quite common there.”
    “But”—she smiled—“who would I talk to?”
    “Which leaves just one place.” He stopped as he stood in front of a piece of modern art that he didn’t recognize.
    “New York,” they said in unison.
    “Think of it, you have all the security you have here and more, but it is thirty flights down. You have a driver and a specially adjusted car, faster, yet heavier, safer. You and the children establish a routine, school runs and so on, and everyone guards that bit of your life with no problem. NYPD, and the FBI, everyone gets together. You are less observed. Your apartment block is your fortress. I know these Secret Service guys drive you crazy, and if it is any consolation we have irritated the hell out of them today, but to be honest if I was advising them I wouldn’t know what else I would suggest they do.”
    They talked into the evening, discussing her alternatives. She gave him a kiss on the cheek before he left.
     
     
     
    She spent time with her brother-in-law, too much time according to the gossips. She went to as many family Sunday lunches as she could face at Hickory Hill to dampen the stories and to give the children the chance of playing with their cousins.
    But it made her feel more isolated than ever. When she married she had entered this gene pool, drunk from it, swum in it, but she could never understand the noisiness and the hearty drinking and eating that went with it. It was not her style.
    Guy’s suggestion stayed with her when she went to Hickory Hill again the following Sunday and tried to relax in their company. Here everything in life was speedily reduced to a joke. The black humor was fast and ferocious.
    It may have been their Irish roots; when things got so bad the only way they could face life was with a laugh and a song. She had certainly enjoyed some of this when Jack was doing the joking and the singing. But their sentimental reminiscences about him, already incorrectly retouched and retold, were too much for her.
    Irish eyes may have been smiling but a thousand cuts were slashing at her heart.
    To be herself, whoever that was nowadays, she would need to escape.
    Within a few weeks she had settled for a home high above the reservoir in New York’s Central Park and this time she chose it, and every item in it, for herself.

CHAPTER Four
     
     
    O ver the years she had come to accept that everything she wore became the subject of comment.
    At the beginning she was irritated when stories about her appearance, especially the fortune she was spending on it, were used to score cheap political points. Once she was under real scrutiny in the White House, the fact that absolutely no one had ever suspected how she felt about her looks, that they had never even come close, gave her extraordinary satisfaction.
    Because the truth was not pretty.
    The myriad contents of the many paper bags from stores like Bonwit Teller, Bergdorf Goodman, Lord & Taylor, plus the monogrammed dress bags and hat boxes from designers such as Oleg Cassini, Halston, and Givenchy, signaled her ambivalence about her image.
    This had