Into The Wilderness: Excerpt
She’d be like Jackie, stoic in her widowhood, even though Dory was already an old man when he died in his sleep after a terrible illness, it was a blessing and not a national tragedy, like the murder of a president right on TV. And Rose was hardly a Jacqueline Kennedy, though she did know how to sew a tailored suit and make a pillbox hat, if it came to that. But where would she wear such an outfit? In Miami, it was shorts and cotton skirts, shirtwaists and sleeveless sheaths. You didn’t need good millinery to play canasta or walk on the beach.
Nu? So? Maybe Jackie made widowhood look good, but Rose knew better. After all, this was her second time. And she was no First Lady with young children and a small fortune. At sixty-four, two husbands dead, it was enough already. Maybe she’d just amuse herself by reading about Jackie’s goings-on. They always reported in the paper when she dined with her brother-in-law, Bobby, who was running for the Senate in New York, even though he was from Massachusetts and lived in DC. No one was going to put in the paper that Rose Mayer was going out to dinner with Stan Samuelson. Stan would ask her, like he asked all the new widows, but Rose didn’t plan on accepting.
Listen to Luskin read an excerpt of Into The Wilderness (~6 minutes)