Read Online Jack's Widow by Eve Pollard - Free Book Online Page B

actors, mixed with the cultural icons who had made up JFK’s old gang.
    The decibel level of the hubbub convinced her that many had brought hip flasks full of whatever they needed to deal with today’s graveside service at Arlington National Cemetery.
    In her low-heeled, rubber-soled shoes she made good speed through the State Dining Room, the Green, Blue, and Red Rooms, desperately trying to remember exactly who had traveled with Jack to Los Angeles that weekend.
    None of her in-laws could be found. Because of the time she had spent upstairs she didn’t know if their absence was to avoid shaking hands with Jack’s successor, or whether, through the many tentacles that the family possessed, they already knew about the star’s death.
    Within minutes she realized that it was not only his family who were missing.
    Others too were absent.
    She could find none of their inner circle, the men and the women who had spent both the high days and the low ones with them in the collaborative girdle that surrounds every leader before and during success. These were the group that had shared their most intimate moments. They had often been too clingy for her liking but they were part of the essential background noise of his presidency. Even as Jack’s girlfriend, she knew that she had to accept their devotion. They had been with Jack for years, on all the campaigns, through many of his illnesses, in the small hours when nuclear bombs threatened. They had waited outside the operating rooms when their babies died; they had downed yards of Black Velvet as they brushed the snow from their shoes on the first day that she had been hostess in this room. They were the cheerleaders, the sympathizers, the empathizers, the jousting knights, the jokers, and most importantly, the fixers.
    Finally, she found one.
    One who had gone west with her husband.
    The tall, boyish figure of Declan O’Donnell was emerging from the men’s room. Was it her imagination or had he made a perfectpirouette and gone into reverse the minute he saw her? One second he was there, the next he had returned to whence he had come from, the one place she couldn’t follow.
    She decided to wait.
    Declan, a bachelor so beloved by the ladies that he was known as “All hands on,” had been best friends with Jack since they were in college together. While the Kennedys were of relatively recent Irish immigrant stock—all of Jack’s great-grandparents had traveled steerage to the United States—Deck was at the core of the Shamrock establishment related to various wealthy landowners. Declan had seen something exciting—call it ambition—in the young student that he knew was missing in himself. The two had studied and gone into the navy together but mostly they had had fun together. Deck, an early orphan with a large inheritance, seemed to have been bred to understand to perfection the innards of a martini, a Hispano Suiza, what makes a woman good in bed, and the name of every maître d’ in New York.
    So trusted was he that he knew all about Jack’s many illnesses. The first one being Addison’s disease, the failure of the adrenal glands, which led to exhaustion and pain and had to be constantly monitored and treated with cortisone. Second were Jack’s severe back problems, which not only meant that he could often only move on crutches or while wearing a corset, he also had to undergo several highly dangerous operations that could have left him crippled. Of course, this was all kept out of the public eye, behind the scenes.
    Declan also knew about Jack’s chlamydia, a sexually transmitted disease. Publicly, his doctors described it as “nongonococcal urethritis.” Yet even though it was treated with antibiotics and other drugs, it was recurrent and was the one known thing to stop him from “anticipating marriage” with whomever he could find, and later, when he was a married man, curtailed what Jack referred to as his “girling.”
    Ever since their teens they had