There were some pretty good moments that weekend, given the basic inescapable tension of the visit. By Sunday, we kids were all playing together and devising silly routines to amuse the adults. Mrs. Kennedy reciprocated with her Russian Cossack dance, featuring full leg extensions. But the standout event came early Saturday morning, when four-year-old John—John wandered unnoticed (by eight Secret Service men!) out to the driveway, climbed behind the wheel of one of the station wagons, released the emergency brake, and hopped nimbly out of the car as it rolled down the hill and crashed into a copper beech tree, which bears the scar to this day.
The shadow came down on us again in 1968, when first Martin Luther King Jr. and then Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. Maybe being grown-up wasn't so much fun after all: They seemed exhausted, haunted, beyond reach. Through those sad, scary times, our mother kept the house open to one and all. There was comfort in our home: in the music, in the hugs and the humor, in the magnificent, healing Chilean soups coming out of our kitchen. There was comfort in Lenny's earthiness, and in Felicia's wit and grace. Together, the two of them conjured a kind of radiance, and for a time it seemed all the world came to them for warmth and solace. In the sad afterdust of September 11, this is what I now remember of that other awful time: that my siblings and I could concentrate on disaster for only so long. Then we had to escape into the safety of our own in-jokes and make-believes, just as my kids do today.
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