Jackie, page 3
I wanted to walk home alone by the Seine and be no one.
* * *
—
That was the future I’d marked off for myself. I could see it, almost breathe it. That was the edge of life I was standing on when I was twenty-one, the night I met you at the Bartletts’.
You were not part of that future. But that night there was something in you that I recognized—something hurtling, disparate—the ranging curiosity, incisive intellect. You were good-looking, of course. Your golden swagger could bend a room. I eschewed that. It smacked of arrogance. That night, though, there was something else in you I saw: something deeper, more fugitive and fragile, a kind of curious hunger to break on the world like a star.
You were not my kind of adventure. Too American. Too good-looking. Too boy. Too much about politics and new money.
Your life, I told myself, was not the life I was looking for.
Spring 1951
“He’s a kind of cheerful lightning,” Charley Bartlett tells me.
“I’ve already met your congressman,” I say. “On a train when I was still at Vassar.”
“And?”
“He was a flirt. We rode the same train for a while. I was the only girl in the car. I was reading and I wasn’t going to waste an hour I wouldn’t get back for a man like that.”
“Like what?”
“The kind who loves a game and will leave it once he’s won.”
Now I’ve been rude. Silence on the line. Then Charley says, “Jack’s better than that.”
“No, Charley,” I say. “You’re better than that.”
Charley Bartlett. Smart, kind, a wonderful writer. He was what my stepbrother Yusha called “an intellectual beau.” Charley tried to introduce me to Jack Kennedy at a wedding the summer before. A ritzy night on Long Island, lanterns strung through the trees. I was talking with a prizefighter when Charley came over and led me by the arm through the giant crowd to where he thought Kennedy was, only to discover he’d left on the heels of some girl.
“Aiming for the Senate,” Charley says to me now on the phone. “He’ll need a wife, and he’s not the buttoned-up boy next door.”
“I’m looking at a job in New York,” I say.
“You should still meet him.”
I don’t answer right away. It all feels a little dull and preordained—that life the young Georgetown set moves in, like fish lazing from one circle to the next.
* * *
—
Still, a week later, a Sunday in May, I drive from my mother’s house down Chain Bridge Road, toward Georgetown. A warm evening, the cherry blossoms have gone by, the leaves already darkening to their summer green. There are narrow tree-lined streets, three shallow stone steps, the brass knocker, and my hand on it, then Charley is crossing the living room to greet me, his wife, Martha, emerging from the kitchen, with a tall glass of what looks like some rum thing. Five months pregnant, radiant, red hair piled on top of her head, she hands Charley the drink, takes my arm, and leads me past the Sheraton armchairs and framed prints onto the terrace, where the others mingle. All people I know, or know of. Pat Roche, whom I competed against at horse shows; her husband, Jeff, who has some connection to Palm Beach; Hickey Sumers, who works at Glamour. Altogether, a party of eight. Still missing one.
Seven-fifteen when he finally shows up, an apology muttered to Charley. His eyes catch mine, then he glances at Hickey, who looks like she’s ready to purr. He’s taller than I remember from the train, but still that odd magnetic sunlight blown around. I watch as the others move toward him. He doesn’t look my way again until later, when he backs up and, by accident, steps on my heel.
“Sorry,” he says.
“Oh, I’m fine.”
“Miss Bouvier.”
“Congressman.”
“We’ve met before?”
I feel the air tighten. “Yes.”
“Remind me.”
“On the Marylander, maybe?”
“You were heading back to school. Vassar, was it?”
I feel a quiet thrill. He knows, and this is a bit of a game. “Yes, Vassar.”
“I remember, you were reading.”
“Jackie’s a tremendous reader,” Charley says. He and Martha have appeared and we’re the four points of a diamond—Charley, Martha, Kennedy, me.
“And now she’s leaving us for Europe,” Martha says. “She’s won the Prix de Paris.”
“Actually, no,” I say. “Those are separate. I’m going to Europe for the summer with my sister, Lee. The Prix de Paris hasn’t yet been announced.”
“What do you get if you win?” Kennedy says. I can tell by how he asks: He likes to win.
“A job at Vogue,” I say. “I’d start in the fall, six months in New York, then six in Paris.”
“She’s being humble,” says Charley. “They’ve practically offered it to you, Jackie.”
I feel heat in my face and force a smile, the best I’m able to manage right then.
“I’m afraid I dealt my chances a blow in one of the essays. They asked for a self-description, and I might have been too honest.”
“What on earth did you say?” Martha asks.
I smile at Jack. “I explained that one of my worst faults is that I get very enthusiastic over something at first, then tire of it halfway through.”
An awkward silence, then Kennedy laughs—a free, bold laugh. Poor Martha, poor Charley—they are good and earnest and kind. Standing there like a pair of hard-boiled eggs with perfect smiles drawn on their round faces, and Jack Kennedy is just looking at me, his eyes still laughing. One hand fiddles at the pocket of his baggy sports coat.
“How many essays did you say you wrote for this thing?” he says.
“I didn’t say. But there were eight. Short.”
“That’s a few more than a few. Eight essays to win a prize you’re not sure you want?”
“It’s like foxhunting,” I say. “You don’t really want to kill the fox, but it’s satisfying to know you can bring down what you’re after.”
He laughs again.
“You like France?” he says. “On the train, I remember, you were reading a book on French art.” He pronounces it with a heavy Boston accent. Aht.
“Malraux,” I say. “I’m quite smitten with André Malraux.”
“Why?”
“His first job was in the antiquarian book trade. He wrote the article that brought Faulkner to the Nobel committee. He won the Prix Goncourt, then spent the prize money scouring Arabia for the lost city of the Queen of Sheba.”
“A French Lawrence.”
“And he admired Lawrence, unlike most of the French.”
“Who still blame Lawrence for the breakdown of French imperial power in Syria.”
“Exactly. Malraux was no false hero.”
This stops him for a moment, like the words sink in deeper than I intend. I remember then what I’d heard about his older brother, Joe Kennedy. How Joe was the one destined for politics. He was a Navy pilot, killed in action. His plane blown up over the English Channel.
It chills me for a moment. It’s sudden and violent, that kind of loss; I soften toward him.
Martha and Charley are talking to other guests now.
“Do you read French?” Kennedy says.
I tell him that when I was a child, my mother used to make us speak French at dinner. We’d play a game with matches. Each of us started with ten. If you said a word in English, you’d throw a match away. Whoever still had a match at the end won.
“Did you usually win?” he asks.
I always won. I don’t tell him this. I don’t have to. He knew before he asked.
“My mother played French records to try to teach us French,” he says.
“Did it work?”
“What do you think?”
“Do you always answer a question with a question, Congressman?”
Once, on an elementary school report card, my teacher wrote: Jacqueline is a darling child, the prettiest little girl, very clever, very artistic, and full of the devil.
Be more ladylike, my mother always told me. Less witty. Less know-it-all. Less. Make a man feel he’s smarter than you. Men don’t like it the other way around.
For the rest of that night, I take more care. I lob questions to Jack Kennedy and the other men about Joe McCarthy’s Un-American Activities Committee, the Rosenberg case, and President Truman’s recent dismissal of General MacArthur. What is your view? Oh, how brilliant! I would never have seen it that way.
Jack Kennedy seems to know all sorts of trivia about every person in the room. He asks Pat Roche about her uncle who sits on the Atomic Energy Commission. He asks Jeff about a mutual friend from Palm Beach. He is politicking, almost like he can’t help it.
At the same time, he seems oddly nervous, constantly touching the pocket of his sports coat or pushing back his hair. The hem of his pants hovers above his ankles. He’s at once detached and weirdly self-conscious. He doesn’t rest on one person or topic for long. He seems easily bored. His sense of humor reminds me of my father’s.
I sip my drink. The ice cubes, softened, clink against the glass.
This time of year—spring—when I was a child, we’d pack up the apartment in New York and move to Lasata, my grandparents’ house in East Hampton—stables for the horses, brass names on the stalls, the tennis court, a grape arbor. My grandmother’s garden wound through the boxwoods. You’d turn a corner and come upon a statue or a sudden stretch of daisies and bachelor buttons. My grandmother would glide through the garden rows in her long dress and sun hat, a basket over her arm with her spade and shears. She’d name the types of roses for me, their English names, Latin names, while my grandfather, in his high collar and brown tweed jacket, roared down the gravel driveway, heading to town in his old red Nash convertible. I’d glimpse him as he whooshed by, his mustache waxed to unyielding points. He kept his hearing aid off as he drove; he loved to feel the vibration of the floorboards and how the wheels took the ruts in the road. I read poetry with him in the afternoons when I came home from swimming at the Maidstone Club. Once, he came to see me ride in a show at Madison Square Garden. He jumped up and down in the stands, yelling at the horse, cheering me on. His nickname was “The Major,” and when he died, the loss left cracks through my heart.
I turn my wrist, quietly check my watch. After 8:00. Soon Martha will corral us inside for casserole—chicken and peas, perhaps—pressed napkins and wedding china. I’ll make it through dinner, then leave directly after. Plead a headache. I don’t like being set up with Jack Kennedy, I’ve decided. I appreciate his intelligence, of course, and sense of humor, but there’s something about the way he looks at me, like he thinks he can just peel me open. I don’t like the flush of heat in my face, that sense of my skin alive. It’s how he looks at every woman, and I don’t like that.
“Have you read the new Faulkner?”
I glance around. Hickey is leaning in to whisper something to Loretta.
“Jackie?”
“What?”
And he is there, that amused look again, like it’s all a game and would I like to play? I feel my pulse race.
“Have you read the new Faulkner?” he says again.
“On my nightstand, I think. A bit down the stack.”
“After?”
“I’m reading a first novel now. Lie Down in Darkness.”
“I saw that review. Who’s the author?”
“William Styron.”
“That was it.”
His hand rakes the flop of hair from his face, and he’s just looking at me like he’s waiting for me to say more, and I’m looking back at him, waiting for another question, because I’ve completely fallen out of the conversation, and now there are others—Charley, Pat—watching the two of us to see where this will go and how it might end. No one says a word. Just a funny starched silence.
“Shall we head in for dinner?” Martha says brightly.
“Yes,” someone answers. Beyond the French doors in the new night, the patio lights bounce down, striking off the stone terrace, as the clock inside chimes the quarter hour, and Jack Kennedy is just standing there, looking at me, still waiting, that little smile. Six feet of casual stardust.
* * *
…
“What was he like?” Lee asks the next morning at breakfast.
“More awkward than I expected,” I say. “In need of a haircut and a square meal.”
“Rich,” my mother says, drinking her orange juice. “Irish, and something of a Lothario.”
“Lothario was Spanish,” I say.
“And your father hates his father.”
“Which hardly matters.” I reach for a piece of toast. “I have no plans to see him again.”
My sister glances at me, that slightly wicked look so altogether Lee, her face with its delicate bones and structured beauty—the kind of beauty that feels almost irretrievable, autocratic, because as a woman you’re told it’s precisely the type of beauty you’re supposed to want and be.
The phone rings. My mother leaves the room to answer it.
Lee sets her coffee cup down.
“Come on, Jacks,” she says. “Tell me. What was he really like?”
The reception room at Vogue. High ceilings, tall windows, a shiny black floor. Large potted plants mixed in with white wicker furniture. Elegantly coiffed women drift by, carrying notebooks and clipboards. Two young secretaries, slim and graceful, sit behind equally graceful Chippendale desks, kitty-corner to one another. One of them hands me an employment form. I sit down on one of the sofas.
- Permanent address?
I write my mother’s and Hughdie’s address at Merrywood in Virginia. I am only the poor relation, I could scribble in the margin. Yes, we come from once-upon-a-money.
- Spouse? None
- Minor children? None
- Religion? Catholic
- Can you type? Yes
- Take shorthand? No
- Do you own a house? No
- Are you communist? No
- Have you ever joined a group plotting to overthrow the government? Not today
I sign the bottom of the form, hand it back, and return to the sofa to wait.
The managing editor, Carol Phillips, comes out.
“We’re so happy to have you on board, Jackie,” she says. “Your writing’s exceptional. We all agreed. I particularly love the piece about your grandfather, the violets with the rain, the swish of traffic outside. You brought us right into that room.”
She leads me through a maze of offices. I meet the personnel director of Condé Nast, then the art director, who’s laying out portraits by Irving Penn for the July issue.
“I love Penn’s work,” I say, looking over the photographs.
“Any in particular?” Carol asks.
“His Twelve Beauties. His still life with the ace of hearts and the black chess piece knight. His Marlene Dietrich.” I smile. Who wouldn’t love Irving Penn’s Dietrich?
Laid out on the worktable are portraits Penn made of a baker, a fishmonger, lorry washers.
“It’ll be called Small Trades,” the art director says.
Yes, I think. The people we don’t see. There’s a portrait of a young Black man in an oilcloth hat with a cart and a hand-chalked sign: Hot Chestnuts Good for the Brain Try a Bag.
Kennedy would love this.
It startles me. Why would he be there, in my thoughts?
I turn to Carol. “I’m just so thrilled,” I say. “I wish September were tomorrow.”
* * *
—
I take a taxi to my father’s apartment on East 74th. The doorman lets me in. It’s after noon. My father is sprawled sound asleep in navy boxers on the living room couch. A small card table propped open, a plate with a sandwich and a knocked-over glass that’s rolled to the edge. I sit down beside him and stroke his face. His hair is wild, a stiff disarray with leftover oil and God knows what else.
“Daddy, wake up,” I say. “I’m here.”
He rolls toward me, his eyes bloodshot, that doomed movie-star swagger.
“Don’t you have an interview?” he murmurs.
“I already went.”
“My best girl,” he says. “I’ll get dressed and be there soon.”
* * *
—
We go to brunch at Schrafft’s.
“So my Jacks will be back in New York,” he says over eggs Benedict and grits. “Which means she’ll be with me.”
I smile and pick through a side of creamed spinach. He is aging. I can see it in his face—heavy lines around his eyes, deeper creases on his cheeks. I don’t have the heart to tell him how the Vogue office, that high-ceilinged, airless space, unsettled me, everything so perfect and neat, the Chippendale desks, wicker couches, and stylized women.
“Fashion has always been more Lee’s world than mine,” I say.
“You can bend any world to yours,” my father says. “They’ve offered the job, right?”
