“Could you stop here for a few minutes?” she said to the cabdriver.
“Sure,” he answered. “A lot of people want to come here.”
She stepped out of the cab and took her daughter’s hand, and they walked slowly up the hill; the heels of her shoes sank into the newly warm earth as they walked. The leaves on the trees were the light, fresh green of early spring.
She paused and turned her head to look out at the city across the river. It was twilight, and the just-vanished sun was leaving a blue-pink haze, the shade of a lilac, hanging low across the tops of the buildings. It was a special time, she thought, mystical. The marble of the buildings still held the pink of the vanishing sun, and they were easy to identify, nestled, now, in their new wrapping of green: the Lincoln, across the river, where Martin Luther King had given his great speech; the Jefferson, with the new buds already starting to appear on the cherry trees around the Tidal Basin; the Capitol, its lighted dome signaling that Congress was still in session. No matter where she went — and she thought she would travel far in her lifetime — there could be no more beautiful spot on the planet than Washington in the spring, at twilight.
She turned back, and she and her daughter walked to the edge of a white picket fence, hardly more than knee-high, in a spot on the hill below the mansion that had once belonged to Robert E. Lee and was now a part of Arlington National Cemetery. There was no one else there at the moment, but the people who had been there before them that day had left their traces: two flags, sunk into the soft earth, and a small bouquet of spring flowers. She stood silently for a moment.
“What’s the big match for, Mommy?” her daughter asked. She smiled. The little girl had a way of putting things that never failed to delight and astonish her.
“It’s the eternal flame. It never goes out. It’s for President Kennedy.”
“Is he in heaven too?”
“Yes, I think he is.”
She remembered the day she had first seen him, in the flesh, standing on the steps of the Rose Garden, in the shaft of light that made him seem so extraordinary. She had a recurring fantasy — one that first came to her on that terrible, endless weekend. She wished she could go back in time, to that afternoon, to stand once again with the heels of her pink suede shoes sinking into the earth. When he turned to look at her, she would say to him, quietly, “Mr. President, please don’t go to Dallas in November. Whatever you do, don’t go to Dallas.” Or sitting in his office, waiting for the photographer, she would blurt it out. “Don’t go to Dallas. Don’t go.” If only she could go back in time.
Five months ago she had stood on the White House driveway with the other reporters, as a press aide handed out small, round badges that said, TRIP OF THE PRESIDENT, on them. She had so wanted to go on one of the presidential trips — was scheduled to go on one, in fact. But not this one.
She had watched as an army of world dignitaries walked down the curving drive of the White House; never again in her lifetime, she thought, would so much rank and power be assembled together in one place; Haile Selassie, the emperor of Ethiopia, small and wizened in his khaki military uniform, walked next to the tall, gaunt, imperial Charles de Gaulle. It was a remarkable sight.
The air on that day was crisp and cold, and the notes of the funeral march rang out, sending shivers right through her body. It seemed she felt rather than heard them. In her mind she could still hear the clack of the hooves of the riderless black horse, the boots inverted in the stirrups to symbolize a fallen leader, as the horse moved down the avenue. Every sight, every sound, burned with a terrible intensity, that day.
“He made us think we could do anything,” she said to her daughter. The little girl looked up at her. “Can we do anything?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. But we have to try.”
She stared into the flickering light of the flame. They would move on, they would grow older, the people who were young with him. He never would. He would walk through their minds’ eyes ever young, ever laughing, always standing, the cold wind whipping his reddish brown hair and the air frosting his breath, telling them to ask not what their country could do for them, but what they could do for their country. There would be other presidents, older, wiser, who would do more than he did. Lyndon Johnson was already steering his legislative program, including the most far-reaching civil rights bill ever signed into law, easily through the shoals of Congress. But no other president would belong to them the way he did. He touched something in the young in a way few other public men ever did. No matter what happened, that would not change. The men who wrote the lyrics were right, it would always be one brief, shining moment for them; always, in their memories, burnished and gleaming as the years rolled on. No matter what the historians wrote, no matter what other, colder eyes saw about him, he was part of them when they were young, and that would never change. The way they lived their lives would be different because of him. In her own work, she thought, there would always be the belief, We can change things. We can do anything.
She looked at her daughter. Would there be someone like him for her generation? Or would there be only more gray men, who never touched them at all?
She had a sudden urge to leave something there; she didn’t know why. She had brought nothing along. But she reached up for the red silk scarf that was around her neck, and she took it off and tied it around one of the white pickets. It seemed right, a bright spot against the earth.
“Good-bye,” she said, and she took her daughter’s hand again, and they went down the hill to where the cab waited. She looked back and could still see the scarf, fluttering lightly in the evening wind.
They got into the taxi, and the driver, a young black man, said, “It’s a good place for him to be, isn’t it? I mean,” he added, “if he has to be dead.”
She nodded. “Yes, it’s a good place.”
“Now it’s the airport, right?”
She leaned back in the seat and put her arm around her daughter. The little girl snuggled close to her.
“Yes,” she said. “To the airport.”