"You are all my people now" (House of Icarus)

A short story about the opposing views and thoughts of Christina Onassis and Jackie Kennedy-Onassis at Aristotle Onassis's funeral

Dazed Woman (Christina)

 

I called her "Kyria" ("Madam"). Towards the end of his life, daddy, called her "E Hira" ("The Widow"); my late brother, Alexander, called her “The American” or "The Geisha".
This woman, this smug looking woman who is coming down the steps towards me looking for all the world like she has just breezed out of lunch at Maxim's, comes down the stairs, and takes my arm gently and guides me across the tarmac.

I don't want to look at her. I don't want her to touch me. I want her to act like a widow. I want her to act like she actually felt something for my father, other than his wallet. I want her to stop pretending that she and I have anything in common. I want her to stop pretending that the world knows we like each other.

I want her to stop smiling.

I hate her.
She detests me.
I know it. She knows it. Daddy knew it.

Everybody knew it.

 

I slide into the limo, and she gracefully follows me. Her brother-in-law, another Kennedy, gets into the limo and sits opposite us. She gives him a brief smile.

No-one speaks. I have nothing to say.

The limo moves off. I glance out of the window and see mourners line the roadside as we pass. "The Old Turk" was loved in Greece.

Ted clears his throat. My eyes have a will of their own as they (and my head) turn round to face him.

"Now Christina" he drawls. "What about taking care of Jackie?"

I stare at him, I stare at her (sitting there nervously, and pushing a strand of hair behind her ear like today is the most normal day in the world), I look back at him. On this day of all days…why is she bringing this up now? My father, her husband, his funeral. What is wrong with them?

I can feel my chest tightening and my nose beginning to throb like it does when I am about to cry and the warm feeling behind my eyes. I don't want them to see my painful tears. They will mistake it for weakness.
Poor poor Christina they will say shaking their heads, lets pick another piece of her, and another and another so Kyria can redecorate her penthouse and Christina, like the no good old man, will pay the bills. Poor poor Christina must pity poor poor Jackie; look she's crying, let’s get her to agree to a huge allowance so Kyria can buy another pair of jeans and sell them two weeks later.

I won't let her do what she did to daddy to me. My head is whirling; I can feel the tears coming. I won't let them have the satisfaction. I have never been good at self-control, I want to open my mouth and scream and scream and scream at them like my brother used to do when he was a child and didn’t get his own way.  I want to tell Kyria that yes, we will discuss her money grabbing ways another time when her lawyers can meet my lawyers, and she doesn't have to bring her brother-in-law along to intimidate a woman who has lost her brother, mother and now father in the space of a few months and has other things to think about other than her already rich enough stepmother and the greedy fingers she always has in the till.

This is my supreme moment. I will never again have this good control over myself.

I raise my hand and bang loudly on the glass window between ourselves and the driver.

"Stop the car!" I say hoarsely, my voice beginning to choke in a mixture of rage and tears.

The driver stops. The convoy stops.

I get out of the car and slam the door. I don't even look at them on the way out. Let them discuss money between them. I don't want to hear it.

The January wind hits me as I hurry over to the car behind where my aunts are, but I hardly feel it. I can feel salt on my lips from the sea, but I don’t recall it until later. 

I can hear the crowd along the side calling to me, and the gulls above me shrieking in the grey sky. I can hear car engines, I can hear the sea.

I can hear my voice in my head screaming.

I wrench open the car door and collapse into the seat. My worried Aunt Merope shuts the door.

"Christina my dear..." Artemis, my father’s only full blood sister, asks.

I throw myself into her arms as the limo starts moving. I gasp out the story, it is gabbled and confusing. My heart breaks. I sob like a child.

Artemis holds me to her the way my own mother never did and strokes my hair.

I don’t mind letting them see me cry.

 

Kyria is kept at the back during the procession up the hill to the chapel. She walks with her children and Ted. My aunts make sure of that. At Greek funerals the widow takes pride of place; but Kyria is not Greek. She was my father’s unfortunate compulsion. She jinxed our family; first my brother died in a plane crash, then my mother was murdered by her husband just like her sister was (I will never call him "uncle" let alone acknowledge him as my step-father), and then finally my father succumbed to her curse and died in Paris, broken not only by the death of his son, but also his wife’s neglect. As much as we hated her, as much as we did what we could to drive her away, as much as she is to blame for breaking up our parents - both Alexander and I knew that "The Singer" would have been there for daddy. Kyria gave him all of ten minutes in the end.

It’s better that she now knows her place in the order of things.

Let her walk behind his family.

 

We left daddy to sleep next to Alexander. Mummy is far away, as she always was to my brother and I.
I couldn’t quite believe it; I didn’t hear the bell ringing rhythmically against the sky, nor did I feel the press of the mourners around me, their hands offering me condolences, their lips on my cheeks, the sorrow or sincerity in their eyes. Artemis’s hysterics seem an echo to me and not quite real. I don’t know what Kyria did; she was not my concern, and after today will not be again. My mind went blank and I found I couldn’t feel anymore.

I am done with dying.

I couldn’t think what I should do next; they were all looking at me; the first woman to head up a multinational billion dollar company. Then it came to me what I should do when I emerged from the chapel and walked towards “The Christina” (a boat daddy named for me, but I have bad memories of. I don’t know what I will do with it. It’s mine now. How odd.). I looked around at the people daddy had left behind; his aides who had known him from the early days, the ship’s crew in their uniforms, the servants, my three aunts, their children and my uncles who I must now care for, the villa servants, the company employees, and then I think of Kyria.

I am on the deck of “The Christina” now. I can see daddy leaning over the rail to look at the sea, tossing a cigarette butt down to the swirling water below. Mummy sits on her sun lounger by the pool, book in hand, a cigarette poised in the other. She looks up at me irritated, and I leave.

This ship is full of ghosts, and I hate it; but they are mine now.

I whisper to one of daddy’s aides that I want to make an announcement, and word goes around.  I stand on a table, not only because I can there be seen and heard better, but because I want to see what is now mine.

I want Kyria to know what is now mine, and what will never be hers.

People press in and stare up at me.

My speech is short and to the point.

“Everything you see is mine! This boat, this island, they are mine! You are all my people now!”

 

The Widow (Jackie)

 

I am a woman who is used to adversity. My first husband was killed right beside me. I do not need to say any more than that. I am also a woman who can see the truth, even if it is painful. I will never let others see how they bother me. I was a penniless little girl born of warring parents born into a family where others had money, and I learnt long ago how to mask my inner feelings. I may appear callous with my smile as I step down the stairs to the tarmac. They will say that it is the same smile I wore when the skies were blue and the seas were wine dark and Telis and I vacationed in the early days of our marriage; but to say that of me is not to know me. This is a smile for them; I do not wish them to think that they are getting to me. They call me a gold digger; they say I cursed the family, they say I married Telis for his money and only for his money. I married him as he was the only man who had the courage to come forward and rescue me. I married him so he could protect my children, America was killing Kennedys. Would any mother have not have thrown herself onto the funeral pyre like I did for any other reason than to protect their children? I know what Alexander that it was a good match because Telis liked names, and I liked money. I know he called me “The American” and refused to speak to me, let alone eat at the same table as me. I know that this poor girl waiting for me on the tarmac, her big eyes boring into mine, her face haggard and drawn looking older than her twenty-four years, calls me “Kyria”. I know that she blames me for the deaths of her family; I know that she even refuses to be on the same continent as me. 

I take her arm and we walk to the car. I can feel her trembling. 

Ted Kennedy, my main brother in law now Bobby has gone, nods and gets into the car. I guide Christina in as if I was with one of my own, my hand gently on her back. She slides across the seat and stares out of the window.

I can think of nothing to say, but Ted looks at me and then at Christina. I shrug nervously.

The limo starts up. For a man who has travelled the world like the Odysseus he so admired; this is to be Telis’s last journey. He will travel to Nidri, and then take the boat across to Skorpios, from there he will travel up the little hill like he had done so often after Alexander was killed, and finally be laid to rest beside his son. The son whose death killed him. 

Ted’s voice cuts into my memories.

“Now Christina" he asks. "What about taking care of Jackie?"

We both react in shock; Christina stares speechless at him, and then at me (I am so embarrassed that I nervously brush some hair behind my ear) and then stops the limo. I can hear the emotion in her voice as she gets out of the car and bolts trying not to show she is crying.

It is true that I had voiced to Ted that I was worried about what would become of me after Telis’s death, and to raise it with Christina, but I didn’t mean here.

I sigh and shake my head at him; if he were a dancer, we would say he had three left feet which he might as well shove in his mouth all at once.

Now I don’t know what she will do. She already hates me enough. The curse accusations are untrue; I brought no curse with me, I am not a poisoned chalice, only a woman who came down off her pedestal to prove she was flesh and blood. Not marble and ice. The sad truth is that I married her father. That is what she cannot forgive.  

 

I walk with my children up the hill. There is a cordon formed in front of me made from womanly flesh and black clad mourners. Dressed in traditional style, Christina walks with her aunts ahead of me. In front of me walk some of Telis’s aides. I, his widow, walk behind them.

During Telis’s last days, it had come to my attention that he was planning on divorcing me. Then he became ill. My children where minors and living in another country, I had to make a choice between my young children or my husband, and who needed me more? My children were living in New York, not Boston, and they needed their mother. My husband, who was planning to divorce me, had his family; his family who were growing more hostile towards me for what they saw as my neglect and my obsessive spending. Like my last husband, he humiliated me. Within weeks of our marriage, he was back through the front door of Maria Callas on the Avenue Froch. He was photographed dining with her in Maxim’s, kissing her on the lips while presenting her gifts on her name day. The difference here was that Telis was not the President. I didn’t have to plaster a smile on and bear it for the sake of a few votes, and I didn’t and wouldn't. I would say that at the beginning our marriage was happy; I was a new toy, and he was a whole new world, but then he got tired of this new toy, and I discovered that this new world was much the same as the last one. I took refuge in the security of my children, and knowing the hostility of his, I feathered my own nest. Yes I spent, but neither husband realised that if I was to endure the other women, then they could pay my dress bills. People forget when vilifying me; Telis, (eager to outdo Jack), in the early days of our marriage, publically said I could spend as much as I wanted. There are no tax payers to worry about now.   

 

I was overcome, but kept my composure when the coffin was lowered into the shadows of the dark earth. Artemis was led out by her husband when the priest bade us to bid farewell to Telis and kiss the ikon on his coffin. I wanted to take Christina in my arms and comfort her; but a chasm is between us. The look on her face frightened me far more than the sight of Telis’s last resting place. Christina will build a roof over his head and a wall around him to protect him from the elements and bring him inside the church. I would have left him the open; that way he can always see the sea and his beloved Ithaca across the bay.

 

The wind blows in from the sea and mournfully wails around the courtyard lifting the leaves of the white lillies when we step outside after the service and ascend the hill. I grip the hands of my children as we walk away; two young lives, too much death in them. I once read that Queen Alexandra of Great Britain commented that on the death of her husband, Edward VII, she said that now she knows where he is. Glib maybe to some, but to women with husbands who stray not just into other beds but have the means to cross oceans to do it, we understand exactly what she meant.

 

“The Christina” is empty of his presence, almost like the sun has gone out of the sky. I notice Christina wandering around; she doesn’t seem to hear what anyone is saying to her. I smile and nod and reply politely to those who wish to give me their condolences, but I can sense the insincerity in half of their voices, and read the fangs behind their smiles and see the worry in their eyes. All of us are in limbo, our Odysseus is dead.

Then people around me start to murmur that Christina wishes to say something, and everyone heads to where Christina is getting up on a table. I am startled, what is she doing?

Christina stands up straight, the wind whipping her black hair around. She looks strangely elegant in her black clothes, although her face is tired and the pupils dilated in her black eyes.  

She looks at all our faces as she speaks, gesticulates and says, “Everything you see is mine! This boat, this island " they are mine! You are all my people now!”