The Liar's Wife by Mary Gordon

that had most gripped their imaginations, the Twin Towers came first, the death of John Kennedy falling far below the first man walking on the moon. It was another thing that made her feel old, and outside the center of the world. No images were more deeply incised in her mind than the Dallas motorcade, veiled Jackie elegantly grieving, John-John’s salute.
    She had been in a pub when she heard of it. The shock of it, the greatest of a series of shocks that had made her feel alone. Moira leaving for the convent; Johnny’s lie, the many lies, about his father, his whole past; even Claire’s revelation about Diarmid and then their insistence to her that it was all right to cover up, to hide, to change the truth if it wasn’t what you liked.
    Her sense of her own strangeness, of her own exclusion, of notbelonging, bubbled up, in the days following John Kennedy’s death, overflowing into a froth of primitive possessive rage. He is not yours. He is ours. America’s.
    She felt enraged at his being claimed by the Irish as one of theirs.
Our dead.
That was a primitive idea; the words were primitive, she knew. And yet they lodged in her mind and would not be uprooted.
Our dead
, she wanted to cry out to the weeping crowds.
    His youth, his beauty, his voice and gestures—she could hear him saying the word “vigah,” his hopefulness, his belief in change, in progress, these belonged to America, not Ireland. And all of them seemed to be rushing into churches, all of them, the most vehement atheists, and the most scurrilous insulters, reveling in every blasphemy, hurtling now into dark, cold buildings where they could hunker and mumble in Latin. There she would not go. She’d believed what they said about the church, it had been her only source of knowledge about it. She’d believed what they said those buildings represented. She could not now so easily unbelieve. But what did they believe, most deeply, what did they value in the bottoms of their hearts, underneath all the bluster, the bravado-filled, rebellious striking out? Then, shuffling out of churches to pubs to sing “The Minstrel Boy” and weep and drink and cross themselves again.
    A lie, a lie. He is not yours. He’s ours. Our dead. America’s. She wanted to stand up on the bar and sing “America the Beautiful.” Shout it like a madwoman over the Irish words. She wanted to say, Did you know, any of you, that I wore a straw hat with his name engraved on it, ringing doorbells in Republican New Canaan, arguing at night with my parents, begging them to vote, to vote for me, winning them over: he was Catholic—oh yes, my friends, it bothered them … they feared he would be taking orders from Rome; my mother, who had volunteered for years at Planned Parenthood, feared what that meant especially. I convinced my father first; he was a war hero, Dad, and then my mother: Mama, look at Nixon’s eyes. He’s not an honest man. What she did not say to him: he is making it possible for us, all of us Americans, to live in a new, larger way.
    Youth and beauty and hope and then the other faces as deeply incised: Lee Harvey Oswald, his face a blur of disappointed failure, andthen impossible to believe, he is shot by Jack Ruby whom she can only think of in movie terms. Cheap hood. All of us American. Not Irish. All of it ours. Not yours. Ours.
    Hope and the dashing of hopes, rubbed out by blurred failures, cheap hoods. The hope. Ours, not yours. And the loss ours.
    Those days, those weeks of hurtling and falling, spinning, dropping, her head always aching and the bones of her face always fragile-feeling. The command in her mind when she woke next to Johnny, the voice saying:
Flee, flee.
He was a stranger to her now as she realized herself a stranger, and so one day she told Johnny she’d be coming home for Christmas and would not come back.
    She left a note on the deal table, “I had to go home,”